Diffusion-Inspired Masked Fine-Tuning for Knowledge Injection in Autoregressive LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) are often used in environments where facts evolve, yet factual knowledge updates via fine-tuning on unstructured text often suffer from 1) reliance on compute-heavy paraphrasing augmentation and 2) the reversal curse. Recent studies show diffusion large language models (dLLMs) require fewer training samples to achieve lower loss in pre-training and are more resistant to the reversal curse, suggesting dLLMs may learn new knowledge more easily than autoregressive LLMs (arLLMs). We test this hypothesis in controlled knowledge fine-tuning experiments and find that while arLLMs rely on paraphrase augmentation to generalize knowledge text into question-answering (QA) capability, dLLMs do not require paraphrases to achieve high QA accuracy. To further investigate whether the demasking objective alone can induce such a knowledge injection advantage in dLLMs regardless of their diffusion denoising paradigm, we propose masked fine-tuning for arLLMs, which prompts an arLLM to reconstruct the original text given a masked version in context. The masked fine-tuning for arLLMs substantially improves the efficacy of knowledge injection, i.e. no paraphrase needed and resistant to the reversal curse, closing the gap between arLLMs and dLLMs. We also demonstrate broader applicability: on a large-scale knowledge-intensive dataset (1.2M samples), masked SFT achieves the best downstream accuracy on GPQA-diamond among all fine-tuning variants. The demasking objective also improves SFT on math tasks, suggesting broad utility beyond factual knowledge injection.