Syllabus and Course Schedule

This syllabus is tentative. The topics and deadlines may change.

DateTagTopicSlides + Readings + Other Miscellaneous Information
Week 1 January 26LectureIntroduction, Language Modeling / N-grams[slides][hw0]

JM chapter3 (focus on 3.1, 3.4, 3.6.1)

Week 2February 2LectureFeature Engineering, Text Classification[slides] [hw0 solutions]

JM ch4.1 - 4.6

February 4AssignmentHW1 released
Week 3February 9LectureWord Embeddings[slides]
JM5.1-5.8
Week 4February 16[NO CLASS - February Break]
February 21AssignmentHW1 due (11.59 p.m.)
Week 5February 23LectureFFNNs, Backprop.[slides]
JM 6
February 24AssignmentHW2 released
Week 6March 2Lecture FFNNs cont., Midterm Review Session[slides]
March 5Exam[Midterm]Location: HLS110, HLSB14, KMBB11
Time: 7.30
Week 7March 9LectureRNNs + attention[slides]
[Handwritten Class Notes]
JM 13 (upto and including 13.4)
Week 8March 16LectureTransformers[slides][Annotated Notes][Annotated Slides]
JM Ch8, upto 8.5 (covers content from this and next lecture)
March 20AssignmentHW2 due (11.59 p.m.)
Week 9March 23LectureTransformers cont., BERT[slides][Written Notes]
JM Ch8, upto 8.5 JM Chatper from earlier book version for BERT.
March 23AssignmentHW3 released
Week 10March 30[NO CLASS - Spring Break]
Week 11April 6LectureBERT + Evaluation[slides][Handritten Notes]
Week 12April 13LectureLLMs + Evaluation cont.[Slides][Handritten Notes]
April 15AssignmentHW3 due (11.59 p.m.)
April 16AssignmentHW4 released
Week 13April 20LectureModernLLMs: Instruction-Tuning, RL [slides] [Handwritten Notes]
Week 14April 27LectureLLM++: Retrieval Augmented LLMs (RAG), Efficiency[slides] (only tokenizers)
[Handwritten Notes] (Retrievers)
Additional resources for retrieval: [Slides 9-16 (inclusive), [Slides 18-30 (inclusive)]
Week 15May 4Lecture Final Review Session
May 6AssignmentHW4 due (11.59 p.m.) [no penalty submission till May 9]
[TBA]Exam[Final]