Syllabus

Date	Topic	Recommended Readings	Deadlines
Week 1 — Mon Aug 26	Lecture — Introduction, Language modeling [slides]
Week 1 — Wed Aug 28	Lecture — Transformers Recap [slides]	Transformer_Vaswani++2017 Annotated Transformer Understanding LSTMs (optional) BERT_Devlin++2018	Paper list out, Friday Aug 30th.
Week 2 — Mon Sep 2	Labor Day — No Class
Week 2 — Wed Sep 4	Lecture - Transformers Recap 2 [slides]	RoBERTa, ALBERT, ELECTRA Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models	Paper Selection Due
Week 3 — Mon Sep 9	Lecture - GPT3++ [slides]	BPE, Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languages GPT-2: Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models	Project Guidelines out Sep 10
Week 3 — Wed Sep 11	Lecture - Prompting, CoT [slides]	Demystifying Prompts in Language Models via Perplexity Estimation Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work? Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners
Week 4 — Mon Sep 16	Lecture - Scaling, Instruction Tuning [slides]	Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task Generalization Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models Alpaca, Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions
Week 4 — Wed Sep 18	Lecture - Instruct Tuning [slides]	How Far Can Camels Go? Exploring the State of Instruction Tuning on Open Resources Transformer Math The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
Week 5 — Mon Sep 23	Student Presentations — The False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs [slides]	Alpaca Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions	Project Proposal Due
Week 5 — Wed Sep 25	Student Presentations — LIMA [slides]	Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/GAIR/lima Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback The Unlocking Spell on Base LLMs: Rethinking Alignment via In-Context Learning
Week 6 — Mon Sep 30	Student presentations — ChatBotArena	Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference Human Feedback is not Gold Standard
Week 6 — Wed Oct 2	Length-controlled Alpaca Eval Review1 discussion — MixEval		Review 1 Due: Oct 1st 11.59 p.m.
Week 7 — Mon Oct 7	Tanya Travelling — No Lecture
Week 7 — Wed Oct 9	Student presentations — Autobencher
Week 8 — Mon Oct 14	Indigenous Peoples' Day — No Class
Week 8 — Wed Oct 16	Student Presentations — Does Fine-Tuning LLMs on New Knowledge Encourage Hallucinations?
Week 9 — Mon Oct 21	Student Presentations — Large Language Models Struggle to Learn Long-Tail Knowledge
Week 9 — Wed Oct 23	Student Presentations — FactScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation
Week 10 — Mon Oct 28	Lecture — Alignment
Week 10 — Wed Oct 30	Student Presentation: A Long Way to Go: Investigating Length Correlations in RLHF
Week 11 — Mon Nov 4	Student presentations Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization Review 2 discussion — Iterative Preference Optimization with the Pairwise Cringe Loss		Review2 Due: Nov 3 11.59pm
Week 11 — Wed Nov 6	Student presentations SimPO: Simple Preference Optimization with a Reference-Free Reward
Week 12 — Mon Nov 11	Student Presentations — LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
Week 12 — Wed Nov 13	Student presentations — StreamingLLM
Week 13 — Mon Nov 18	Student presentations — Speculative Decoding
Week 13 — Wed Nov 20	Student Presentations — Medusa Decoding
Week 14 — Mon Nov 25	Student presentations — Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models	kNN-LM Does Not Improve Open-ended Text Generation
Week 14 — Wed Nov 27	Thanksgiving Break — No Class
Week 15 — Mon Dec 2	Lecture
Week 15 — Wed Dec 4	Project Presentations		Project Presentation
Week 16 — Mon Dec 9	Project Presentations		Project Report (Due Dec 16)