Mechanism Shift During Post-training from Autoregressive to Masked Diffusion Language Models

Abstract

Post-training pretrained autoregressive models (ARMs) into masked diffusion models (MDMs) has emerged as a cost-effective way to overcome the limitations of sequential generation. Yet it remains unclear whether post-trained MDMs acquire genuinely new computational mechanisms or merely re-express autoregressive computation in a non-autoregressive form. Through a comparative circuit analysis of ARMs and their MDM counterparts post-trained from the same backbones, we uncover two complementary axes of reorganization. Structurally, the shift is task-dependent: MDMs preserve autoregressive circuitry on locally causal tasks but abandon inherited pathways and front-load computation into early layers on global tasks. Semantically, the shift is consistent across regimes: sharp, localized specialization in ARMs gives way to distributed integration in MDMs. Together, these findings show that diffusion post-training is not a surface-level change in the generation procedure but a reorganization of internal computation whose depth depends on the task.