Attention-Discounted Adaptive Sampler for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked diffusion language models can reduce inference steps by revealing multiple tokens per denoising iteration, but this parallelism is fragile: positions that are individually confident may be unsafe to commit together when their predictions are coupled. Existing training-free samplers such as Top-(k), Fast-dLLM, and EB-Sampler mainly control how many tokens to reveal, while often ranking candidates by token-wise scores that ignore interactions within the selected set. We propose ADAS, a training-free reranking rule for parallel masked diffusion decoding. ADAS leaves the base sampler's stopping rule unchanged and modifies only subset construction: it greedily discounts a candidate when it attends strongly to already selected positions whose predictions remain uncertain. Unlike graph-constrained methods that turn attention into hard compatibility constraints, ADAS keeps attention continuous and uses it as a soft marginal penalty. Across LLaDA-8B-Base and Dream-7B-Base on GSM8K, MATH500, HumanEval, and MBPP, plugging ADAS into Top-(k), Fast-dLLM, and EB-Sampler improves low-NFE performance at matched denoiser evaluations by (9.11) and (10.46) percentage points on average, respectively, with (3.1\%) per-forward runtime overhead. These results show that soft attention-discounted reranking is a simple and modular way to improve quality in highly parallel decoding for masked diffusion language models.