Neural Estimation of Pairwise Mutual Information in Masked Discrete Sequence Models
Authors: Jai Sharma, Yifan Wang, Bryan Li
Summary
arXiv:2605. 20187v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding dependencies between variables is critical for interpretability and efficient generation in masked diffusion models (MDMs), yet these models primarily expose marginal conditional distributions and do not explicitly represent inter-variable dependence.
Relevance
Read next because Neural Estimation of Pairwise Mutual Information in Masked Discrete Sequence Models overlaps with clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)", clean result "Only continuous soft prefixes hit both EM axes at once on Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct: discrete prompt searches split between the alignment objective and the distributional objective, and both discretizations of the soft prefix collapse (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Training one persona to emit a [ZLT] marker without bystanders adopting it has a one-cell-wide LR x epochs window on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (LOW confidence)". Matching terms: rect, under, eval, compare, full, trained, model. Source: arxiv cs.LG (Machine Learning).
Abstract
arXiv:2605.20187v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding dependencies between variables is critical for interpretability and efficient generation in masked diffusion models (MDMs), yet these models primarily expose marginal conditional distributions and do not explicitly represent inter-variable dependence. We propose a neural framework for estimating pairwise conditional mutual information (MI) directly from the hidden states of a pretrained MDM, using ground-truth MI computed from the model's own conditional distributions for supervision. The resulting estimator captures the model's internal belief about dependency structure and predicts the full MI matrix in a single forward pass, enabling MI-guided parallel decoding by identifying conditionally independent subsets of variables. We evaluate our approach on Sudoku and protein sequence generation with ESM-C, where the MI maps recover known structural constraints and enable a 3-5x magnitude reduction in inference-time forward passes compared to sequential decoding, while preserving generative quality and outperforming entropy-based parallelization methods.