Subliminal Clocks: Latent Time Modelling in Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2607.01774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models. Unlike standard diffusion-based approaches, DLMs are not explicitly conditioned on a timestep, raising a natural question: do these models internally represent denoising progress, and how is such information used downstream? In this work, we show that DLMs do in fact encode a latent representation related to the diffusion timestep within their residual streams. We find that this signal can be reliably extracted using probes across layers, i