Paper

LLaDA-Image: Building Strong Image Generators with Fully Open Training Recipes

We introduce LLaDA-Image, a unified framework that pairs a 6B Diffusion Transformer (DiT) trained from scratch with a frozen vision-language understanding module built on the LLaDA2.0-Mini diffusion language model backbone. Instead of relying heavily on paired image-text data from the beginning, we first build a strong visual generative prior through image-only pre-training and mid-training. The generation pipeline c · Authors: Chuyan Chen, Haoxing Chen, Kun Chen, Zhenglin Cheng, Long Cui, Ruishan Fang… · Published 2026-09-03 · arXiv:2609.03796

Published
2026-09-03
Authors
30
arXiv
2609.03796
Category
cs.CV

Abstract

arXiv:2609.03796

Chuyan Chen, Haoxing Chen, Kun Chen, Zhenglin Cheng, Long Cui, Ruishan Fang, Zhangxuan Gu, Zhicheng Huang, Zhenzhong Lan, Yuanting Lei, Haoquan Li, Jianguo Li…

We introduce LLaDA-Image, a unified framework that pairs a 6B Diffusion Transformer (DiT) trained from scratch with a frozen vision-language understanding module built on the LLaDA2.0-Mini diffusion language model backbone. Instead of relying heavily on paired image-text data from the beginning, we first build a strong visual generative prior through image-only pre-training and mid-training. The generation pipeline comprises 220M samples, 98 of which are real images. For efficient and scalable optimization, we use parameter-free RMSNorm throughout the DiT together with the Muon optimizer. The resulting unified model produces highly photorealistic images while accurately following fine-grained editing instructions. We further distill LLaDA-Image into LLaDA-Image-Turbo, enabling fast inference in 2-4 sampling steps. On Qwen-Image-Bench, LLaDA-Image achieves overall scores of 53.53 and 53.38 on the English and Chinese tracks, respectively, setting a new state-of-the-art among open-source models on both tracks. To support further research on capable and efficient generative models, we release our model weights, training code, and detailed recipes.