ML-GSAI/LLaDA

Official PyTorch implementation for "Large Language Diffusion Models"

What it solves

LLaDA addresses the assumption that high-level Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities—such as in-context learning and instruction-following—are exclusively tied to autoregressive (next-token prediction) architectures. It explores the upper limits of masked diffusion models for language generation at scale.

How it works

Unlike standard LLMs that predict the next token in a sequence, LLaDA is a masked diffusion model. It uses a Transformer architecture but employs a probabilistic modeling approach where it learns to recover original tokens from a masked sequence. During training, it uses a masking ratio that varies randomly between 0 and 1, which makes its training objective an upper bound on the negative log-likelihood of the model distribution, turning it into a generative model. For inference, it iteratively refines the sequence through a remasking process.

Who it’s for

Researchers and developers interested in alternative LLM architectures, specifically those exploring diffusion-based language modeling as an alternative to autoregressive models.

Highlights

  • Scale: An 8B parameter model trained from scratch that rivals LLaMA3 8B in performance.
  • Architectural Flexibility: Uses a standard Transformer architecture without needing time $t$ as an input.
  • MoE Variant: Includes LLaDA-MoE, the first diffusion language model pretrained from scratch with a Mixture-of-Experts architecture.
  • Multimodal Extension: LLaDA-V extends the diffusion-based approach to vision-language modeling.
  • Efficiency Improvements: The iLLaDA version improves both benchmark performance and generation efficiency.

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