Beyond the Sequentiality Bottleneck: A Hybrid Diffusion-Autoregressive Framework for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Wei Cai, Jian Zhao, Yuchen Yuan, Xuelong Li

Autoregressive models (ARMs) face a "Sequentiality Bottleneck" in reasoning, while diffusion language models (DLMs) offer parallelism but lack semantic coherence. To addresses both limitations, we propose Collaborative Reasoning Asymmetric Learning (CoRAL), a hybrid framework via an Asymmetric Planner-Executor (APE) architecture: a DLM Planner generates K diverse reasoning trajectories in parallel, while a large ARM Executor selects the optimal plan and synthesizes the final answer. To train the Planner effectively, we introduce Reward-Guided Denoising for CoT (RDC), which integrates outcome-based rewards into the diffusion process to steer it toward goal-directed reasoning. Experiments on vision-language benchmarks show that CoRAL significantly outperforms prior diffusion-based methods and achieves competitive performance against strong ARMs, achieving both superior efficiency and quality.