Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text through iterative denoising. In commonly adopted parallel decoding schemes, each step confirms only high-confidence positions while remasking the others. By analyzing dLLM denoising traces, we uncover a key inefficiency: models often predict the correct target token several steps before its confidence becomes high enough to be decoded. This gap between early prediction and late decoding forces repeated remasking of already-correct tokens, causing redundant iterations and limiting acceleration. To exploit this temporal redundancy, we introduce Trace Credit to quantify a token’s decoding potential by accumulating historical evidence. Building on this, we propose CreditDecoding, a training-free parallel decoding method that fuses Trace Credit with current logits to boost the confidence of correct but underconfident tokens, thereby accelerating denoising and improving robustness. On eight benchmarks, CreditDecoding achieves up to 5.48 times speedup with +0.48 accuracy on LLaDA-8B and consistently improves performance across diverse dLLM architectures and parameter scales. It further scales to long contexts and remains orthogonal to mainstream inference optimizations, making it a practical and widely applicable solution.

While Transformer models have achieved remarkable success in various domains, the effectiveness of information propagation through deep networks remains a critical challenge. Standard hidden state residuals often fail to adequately preserve initial token-level information in deeper layers. This paper introduces ResFormer, a novel architecture that enhances information flow by incorporating value residual connections in addition to hidden state residuals. And a variant is SVFormer, where all layers share the first layer’s value embedding. Comprehensive empirical evidence demonstrates ResFormer achieves equivalent validation loss with 16.11% fewer model parameters and 20.3% less training data compared to Transformer, while maintaining similar memory usage and computational cost. Besides, SVFormer reduces KV cache size by nearly half with only a small performance penalty and can be integrated with other KV-efficient methods, yielding further reductions in KV cache, with performance influenced by sequence length and cumulative learning rate.