Bangalore Paper Club - Edition #2

Researchers and builders rarely get together. That's exactly what The Research Room is for. Every few weeks, we bring together a small group of researchers, engineers, and builders to work through influential ML papers; not just discuss them, but unpack the ideas, assumptions, and math that makes it amazing research. catch up on Edition 1 here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TROrlh_46E Expect someone walking through a proof, reasoning through an architecture and having the kind of debates that only happen when everyone in the room has actually read the paper. This edition, we're covering: 1. LLaDA: Large Language Diffusion Models arxiv.org/abs/2502.09992 Can language models move beyond generating one token at a time? LLaDA introduces a scalable diffusion-based alternative that revisits how text is generated, opening up new possibilities for parallel decoding and efficient inference. 2. Nemotron-TwoTower: An Efficient Architecture for Diffusion Language Models arxiv.org/abs/2606.26493 As diffusion language models become practical, what architectures best support them? NVIDIA's TwoTower design separates contextual understanding from denoising, demonstrating substantial inference speedups while maintaining strong language quality. 3. TBA 4. TBA Format Each paper is presented by an attendee (15–20 minutes), followed by an open discussion. We will go beyond the abstract and discuss derivations, architectural decisions, experimental methodology, and what actually holds up in practice. Small group, capped attendance, so everyone gets to challenge assumptions, ask questions, and explore ideas without the pressure of a conference Q&A. Who should come Researchers, ML engineers, graduate students, and builders who enjoy digging into papers beyond the headline results. Reading the papers beforehand isn't required, but you'll get much more out of the discussion if you do. What to bring A laptop or notebook, the papers (shared ahead of time), curiosity, and a willingness to change your mind. Hosted by Conscious Engines, Bangalore.