HyperAIHyperAI

Command Palette

Search for a command to run...

D^2-Monitor: Dynamic Safety Monitoring for Diffusion LLMs via Hesitation-Aware Routing

Aoxi Liu Yupeng Chen James Oldfield Guanzhe Hong Junchi Yu Baoyuan Wu Philip Torr Adel Bibi

Abstract

Despite the emergence of diffusion large language models (D-LLMs) as an alternative to autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), safety monitoring for D-LLMs remains largely unexplored. Unlike AR-LLMs, D-LLMs generate text through a multi-step denoising process, exposing intermediate hidden representations that may contain safety-relevant information unavailable in standard single-step monitoring setups. Motivated by the suitability of lightweight probes for always-on monitoring, we analyze which trajectory-level signals best indicate when such probes are likely to struggle. We find that the most informative signal is safety hesitation: intermediate hidden states repeatedly falling within a small margin of the probe's decision boundary. The number of such hesitation steps in D-LLM's trajectory predicts probe failure effectively, providing a proxy of sample difficulty. Building on this analysis, we propose D^2-Monitor, a bi-level safety monitor for D-LLMs. D^2-Monitor adopts a lightweight probe as an always-on monitor to jointly estimate hesitation and perform base classification. When the hesitation level exceeds a threshold, a more expressive but computationally heavier probe is activated. This dynamic routing mechanism allocates monitoring resources efficiently at test time. Evaluated on 3 datasets (WildguardMix, ToxicChat, OpenAI-Moderation) across 4 D-LLMs, D^2-Monitor achieves state-of-the-art performance with a compact parameter footprint (leq 0.85M parameters), and exhibits the best trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency relative to 8 baselines.


Build AI with AI

From idea to launch — accelerate your AI development with free AI co-coding, out-of-the-box environment and best price of GPUs.

AI Co-coding
Ready-to-use GPUs
Best Pricing

HyperAI Newsletters

Subscribe to our latest updates
We will deliver the latest updates of the week to your inbox at nine o'clock every Monday morning
Powered by MailChimp