LLaDA is a masked diffusion language model based on the Llama backbone. Unlike autoregressive models that generate one token at a time, LLaDA generates all tokens in parallel through iterative refinement — making it compute-bound rather than memory-bound on CPU.

On a 12-core CPU, LLaDA with diffuse-cpp reaches 27.7 tok/s on translation tasks — 3.3x faster than llama.cpp (8.51 tok/s) on the same hardware.

Available Quantizations

File	Type	Size	Description
`llada-8b-f16.gguf`	F16	~14.9 GB	Full precision, best quality
`llada-8b-q8_0.gguf`	Q8_0	~8.4 GB	8-bit quantization, near-lossless
`llada-8b-q4km.gguf`	Q4_K_M	~5.1 GB	4-bit mixed, best speed/quality ratio

Recommended: Q4_K_M for most users.

Quick Start

bash

# Download
huggingface-cli download diffuse-cpp/LLaDA-8B-Instruct-GGUF llada-8b-q4km.gguf

# Build diffuse-cpp
git clone --recursive https://github.com/iafiscal1212/diffuse-cpp.git
cd diffuse-cpp
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

# Run
./build/diffuse-cli -m ../llada-8b-q4km.gguf \
    --tokens "128000,3923,374,279,6864,315,9822,30" \
    -n 256 -s 16 -t 12 --remasking entropy_exit

Performance

Benchmarked on AMD EPYC 4465P 12-Core, Q4_K_M, entropy_exit + inter-step cache, B=256:

Prompt	No-Cache	Cache	Steps	vs llama.cpp
Capital of France?	17.5	24.4 tok/s	3	2.9x
Translate to French	25.9	27.7 tok/s	2	3.3x
15 x 23?	12.8	15.7 tok/s	4	1.8x
Translate to Spanish	7.6	22.9 tok/s	7	2.7x
Python is_prime()	3.2	4.9 tok/s	16	0.6x
Poem about ocean	3.2	5.3 tok/s	16	0.6x
Why is sky blue?	3.3	12.0 tok/s	16	1.4x
List the planets	3.3	9.4 tok/s	15	1.1x
Average	9.6	15.3 tok/s		1.8x

Inter-step cache: 1.6x average speedup with no quality degradation
6 of 8 prompts outperform llama.cpp (8.51 tok/s baseline)
LLaDA excels at translation tasks (converges in 2-5 steps)

Model Details

Architecture: Llama backbone with bidirectional (non-causal) attention
Parameters: 8B
Layers: 32
Hidden size: 4096
Attention: MHA (32 query heads, 32 KV heads)
FFN: SwiGLU, intermediate 12288
Vocabulary: 126,464 tokens
RoPE theta: 500,000
Mask token ID: 126336

Also Available

Dream-v0-Instruct-7B-GGUF — Qwen2.5 backbone, GQA. Excels at math and code (21.6 tok/s, correctly solves arithmetic in 2 steps).

Citation

bibtex

@software{diffuse_cpp_2026,
  title={diffuse-cpp: High-Performance Inference for Diffusion Language Models},
  author={Carmen Esteban},
  year={2026},
  url={https://github.com/iafiscal1212/diffuse-cpp}
}

License

Apache 2.0