This work presents Diffusion Layer Integrated Gradients (DLIG), a token attribution method for diffusion language models (DLMs) that extends Integrated Gradients (IG~\cite{sundararajan2017axiomatic}) to arbitrary layers and denoising steps.
DLIG attributes a DLM's progressive commitment to a self-generated or fixed completion for an input prompt.
We establish direct correspondences between DLIG and the IG axioms of completeness, implementation invariance, linearity, and symmetry preservation.
As a lightweight complement to interventional analysis, DLIG provides an inexpensive first check of mechanistic hypotheses across the denoising trajectory.
We demonstrate this on word-sense disambiguation, multi-hop graph reasoning, and sentence infilling, revealing how DLMs draw on inputs across positions, layers, and denoising steps.