Preprint Open access
LOCKR: A Hidden-State Trajectory-Guided Planner for Detecting and Repairing Stable-but-Wrong Lock-In in Diffusion Language Models
Diffusion language models generate text through iterative denoising, exposing intermediate trajectories before final answers are produced. We identify a recurring reasoning failure, stable-but-wrong lock-in, where an answer stabilizes early around an incorrect value while substantial denoising remains. Surface-level de …