README.md

---
license: apache-2.0
tags:
  - diffusion
  - llada
  - gguf
  - cpu-inference
  - diffuse-cpp
language:
  - en
base_model: GSAI-ML/LLaDA-8B-Instruct
pipeline_tag: text-generation
---

# LLaDA-8B-Instruct-GGUF

GGUF quantizations of [GSAI-ML/LLaDA-8B-Instruct](https://huggingface.co/GSAI-ML/LLaDA-8B-Instruct) for use with [diffuse-cpp](https://github.com/iafiscal1212/diffuse-cpp), the first C++ inference engine for Diffusion Language Models.

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](https://huggingface.co/diffuse-cpp/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