Latent-DARM: Bridging Discrete Diffusion and Autoregressive Models for Reasoning

  • Lina Berrayana ,
  • Ahmed Heakl ,
  • Muhammad Abdullah Sohail ,
  • Thomas Hofmann ,
  • Salman Khan ,

Proceedings of Workshop on Latent & Implicit Thinking – Going Beyond CoT Reasoning (LIT), the 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) |

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Most multi-agent systems rely exclusively on autoregressive language models (ARMs) that are based on sequential generation. Although effective for fluent text, ARMs limit global reasoning and plan revision. On the other hand, Discrete Diffusion Language Models (DDLMs) enable non-sequential, globally revisable generation and have shown strong planning capabilities, but their limited text fluency hinders direct collaboration with ARMs. We introduce Latent-DARM, a latent-space communication framework bridging DDLM (planners) and ARM (executors), maximizing collaborative benefits. Across mathematical, scientific, and commonsense reasoning benchmarks, Latent-DARM outperforms text-based interfaces on average, improving accuracy from 27.0% to 36.0% on DART-5 and from 0.0% to 14.0% on AIME 2024. Latent-DARM approaches the results of state-of-the-art reasoning models while using less than 2.2% of its token budget. This work advances multi-agent collaboration among agents with heterogeneous models.