Language & LLMs Dec 2025 · #40 most cited · 123 citations

LLaDA2.0: Scaling Up Diffusion Language Models to 100B

Tiwei Bie et al.

arXiv:2512.15745

In short

LLaDA2.0 scales diffusion language models to 100B parameters by converting a pretrained autoregressive model rather than training from scratch, using a warm-up, stable and decay schedule over block sizes. The resulting mixture-of-experts models decode in parallel for speed.

Why it matters

It shows diffusion LLMs can reach frontier scale by inheriting from existing models.

Read first

The 4 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 22 ideas · basics first
  1. Natural Language Processing ✓ understood

    The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.

  2. Token ✓ understood

    The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.

  3. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  4. Language Modeling ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  5. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  6. Training ✓ understood

    The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.

  7. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  8. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  9. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  10. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  11. Feature ✓ understood

    A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.

  12. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  13. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  14. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  15. Embedding ✓ understood

    A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.

  16. Attention Mechanism ✓ understood

    A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.

  17. Transformer ✓ understood

    A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.

  18. Large Language Model · read first ✓ understood

    A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.

  19. Autoregressive Model · read first ✓ understood

    A model that generates output one token at a time, using previously generated tokens as input for the next prediction.

  20. Diffusion Model · read first ✓ understood

    A generative model that learns to denoise data, achieving state-of-the-art image generation (Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2).

  21. Feedforward Network ✓ understood

    A neural network where information flows in one direction from input to output without cycles.

  22. Mixture of Experts · read first ✓ understood

    An architecture where multiple specialized sub-networks (experts) process inputs, with a gating network routing to relevant experts.

In the frontier

Rank
#40 of 100
Citations
123
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Dec 2025

Topics: Diffusion LMs and decoding , Efficiency and serving , Model architecture

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

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