Answer First, Reason Later: When Commitment Order Costs Accuracy in Diffusion Language Models
Masked diffusion language models revise many masked output positions in parallel. We call a token committed once it becomes visible and is never masked again, and call a response answer-first when the final answer commits before the reasoning printed ahead of it. On 1,069 GSM8K test questions, an explicit step-by-step instruction increases the accuracy difference between unrestricted decoding and a decoder that permits commitment only near the left-most unresolved position; unrestricted decoding also produces more answer-first trajectories. On MATH-500, the two LLaDA models spend most of a short output canvas on reasoning that commits after the answer, and the benefit of frontier gating decreases as that postanswer writing disappears. Dream-7B has little post-answer writing and follows a different accuracy pattern. A controlled four-option task reserves a one-token answer position before generation. Delaying that position outperforms an equally timed reasoning-token delay on LLaDA-8B, LLaDA-1.5, and Dream-7B. The raw difference is largest on Dream, whose free accuracy on the controlled task is lower. Answers commit much earlier under the reserved-position interface than in ordinary free-form generation, which limits how far the intervention result can be generalized. Commitment order affects the context used to complete a response and the allocation of a finite output canvas.