Label Collapse in Diffusion Language Model In-Context Learning

Ziye Guo, Ye Yuan

In-context learning (ICL) applies large language models to new tasks by prepending a few labeled demonstrations to a query. Prior work has studied how demonstration ordering affects ICL, but the interaction between label arrangement patterns and model biases has not been systematically examined. We define label collapse as the failure mode in which the model generates query-independent labels, and show that it is architecturally universal at the tested 8-9B scale: five models spanning autoregressive (Llama-3, Qwen3.5) and discrete diffusion (LLaDA, iLLaDA, LLaDA-Instruct) families all exhibit label collapse even under the class-balanced alternating arrangement, with some label word pairs collapsing in virtually every tested condition and others flipping their collapse direction with arrangement. Critically, accuracy alone cannot detect this collapse: models can achieve near-chance accuracy while generating query-independent labels, a score indistinguishable from balanced performance, so the failure can persist undetected in deployment. We measure separation, the log-odds of the two label words at the query position (the quantity that label-bias calibration operates on), as a…