I suspect you could get interesting results, but DiffusionGemma has a lot of knowledge that may be challenging to train into the smaller models. The advantage of pulling a fully-trained diffusion model off the shelf is that it already knows all of this, has been trained as a MoE, etc.

What I think these models actually need is a structured decision thinking mode. As it stands now, the only way to think about the answers with DiffusionGemma is to diffuse a thinking block, but giving the model an auto-regressive thinking space to reason, even just lightly, could drastically improve performance.