---
license: mit
library_name: pytorch
tags:
  - diffusion-language-model
  - masked-diffusion
  - llada
  - text-generation
  - nanodiff
datasets:
  - HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu
language:
  - en
pipeline_tag: text-generation
---

# nanoDiff 150M — base

A **masked diffusion language model** trained with the LLaDA recipe, from the
[nanoDiff](https://github.com/BY571/nanoDiff) project — a minimal, hackable
"nanoGPT for diffusion LLMs".

The larger sibling of [nanodiff-50m-base](https://huggingface.co/Sebasdi/nanodiff-50m-base).
This is the **base model** — pretrained on raw web text only, no instruction
tuning. It continues documents; it does not answer questions.

## TL;DR

| | |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Masked diffusion LM (LLaDA recipe), bidirectional Transformer |
| Parameters | ~203M total · ~152M non-embedding (tied input/output embeddings) |
| Training data | FineWeb-Edu, ~3B tokens |
| Validation | NLL-bound **3.78** nats/token · perplexity **43.8** |
| Hardware | NVIDIA DGX-Spark (GB10), ~25 h |

For reference, the 50M sibling reaches val 3.92 (perplexity ~50) — but note the
two were trained on different token budgets (50M: 2B, 150M: 3B), so that gap is
not a clean capacity-only comparison.

## Provenance

- **Code:** https://github.com/BY571/nanoDiff
- **Trained at commit:** `fc0833c`
- **Config:** `pretrain/configs/150m.py`
- **Reproduce:** `python scripts/prepare_data.py --out-dir data/fineweb_edu_10b --num-tokens 10_000_000_000`
  then `python pretrain/train.py --config pretrain/configs/150m.py`

## Architecture

A decoder-style Transformer with **bidirectional** self-attention — the one
architectural change from an autoregressive GPT, since a diffusion LM denoises
all positions at once.

| Hyperparameter | Value |
|---|---|
| Layers | 12 |
| Attention heads | 16 |
| Embedding dim (`n_embd`) | 1024 |
| Context length (`block_size`) | 512 |
| Positional encoding | RoPE |
| Vocabulary | 50304 (GPT-2 BPE 50257 + `[MASK]`@50257 + padding) |
| Embeddings | tied (input = output) |
| Total parameters | ~203M (~152M non-embedding) |

## Training objective

Masked (absorbing-state) diffusion, following
[LLaDA](https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09992): each token is independently replaced
by `[MASK]` with probability `t ~ U(0, 1)`; the model predicts the clean tokens
at all masked positions in one pass; the loss is a `1/t`-weighted cross-entropy
over masked positions (an upper bound on the negative log-likelihood).
Time-free parameterization — `t` is not fed to the model.

## Training setup

| | |
|---|---|
| Dataset | FineWeb-Edu, GPT-2 BPE, uint16 memmap |
| Tokens seen | ~3.0B (46,000 iters × batch 128 × 512 ctx) |
| Optimizer | AdamW (β1 0.9, β2 0.95, weight decay 0.1, grad clip 1.0) |
| LR schedule | WSD — warmup 1000, stable, linear decay over the final 15000 iters |
| Peak / min LR | 8e-4 → 1e-5 |
| Batch size | 128 sequences |
| Precision | bf16 autocast |
| Compilation | `torch.compile` |
| Hardware | NVIDIA DGX-Spark (GB10), single device |
| Wall-clock | ~25 hours |

## Results

Offline evaluation (`eval.py`, 500 batches) on the FineWeb-Edu validation split:

- **NLL-bound: 3.78 nats/token**
- **Perplexity: ~43.8**

## Intended use

A research / learning artifact, not a product.

- ✅ A base model to supervised-fine-tune, or to study masked-diffusion
  training and sampling dynamics.
- ❌ Not an instruction-following model. Prompt it document-style ("The history
  of Rome is"), not question-style.

## Sampling — important

Small diffusion LMs collapse into repetition loops under the default
low-confidence remasking sampler. Use a **frequency repetition penalty**:

```bash
python sample.py --ckpt nanodiff-150m-base.pt \
    --prompt "The history of Rome is" --rep-penalty 3.0
```

`chat.py` and `sample.py` default `rep_penalty` to `3.0`.

## Limitations

- **Confabulates.** At ~150M params on ~3B tokens, factual recall is
  unreliable. It learned English structure, not a dependable world model.
- Coherence degrades on harder prompts.
- English only; FineWeb-Edu domain.
- Base model — no alignment, no safety tuning.

## Citation

Built on the LLaDA recipe:

```bibtex
@article{nie2025llada,
  title   = {Large Language Diffusion Models},
  author  = {Nie, Shen and others},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.09992},
  year    = {2025}
}
```