Autoregressive models (ARMs) are widely regarded as the cornerstone of large language models (LLMs). We challenge this notion by introducing LLaDA, a diffusion model trained from scratch under the pre-training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) paradigm. LLaDA models distributions through a forward data masking process and a reverse process, parameterized by a vanilla Transformer to predict masked tokens. By optimizing a likelihood bound, it provides a principled generative approach for probabilistic inference. Across extensive benchmarks, LLaDA demonstrates strong scalability, outperforming our self-constructed ARM baselines. Remarkably, LLaDA 8B is competitive with strong LLMs like LLaMA3 8B in in-context learning and, after SFT, exhibits impressive instruction-following abilities in case studies such as multi-turn dialogue. Moreover, LLaDA addresses the reversal curse, surpassing GPT-4o in a reversal poem completion task. Our findings establish diffusion models as a viable and promising alternative to ARMs, challenging the assumption that key LLM capabilities discussed above are inherently tied to ARMs. Project page and codes:this https URL.
View on arXiv@article{nie2025_2502.09992,
title={ Large Language Diffusion Models },
author={ Shen Nie and Fengqi Zhu and Zebin You and Xiaolu Zhang and Jingyang Ou and Jun Hu and Jun Zhou and Yankai Lin and Ji-Rong Wen and Chongxuan Li },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09992},
year={ 2025 }
}