Schedule
-
EventDateDescriptionDescription
-
Session05/06/2025 22:00
TuesdayFirst Lecture -
Lecture05/06/2025
TuesdayLecture 0: Course Overview and LogisticsLecture Notes:
-
Lecture05/06/2025
TuesdayLecture 1: Tokenization and EmbeddingLecture Notes:
- Chapter 1 - Section 1 Pgs 1:18
Further Reads:
- Tokenization: Chapter 2 of [JM]
- Embedding: Chapter 6 of [JM]
- Original BPE Algorithm: Original BPE Algorithm proposed by Philip Gage in 1994
- BPE for Tokenization: Paper Neural machine translation of rare words with subword units by Rico Sennrich, Barry Haddow, and Alexandra Birch presented in ACL 2016 that adapted BPE for NLP
-
Lecture05/08/2025
ThursdayLecture 2: Language Distribution and Bi-Gram ModelLecture Notes:
- Chapter 1 - Section 1 Pgs 18:32
Further Reads:
- LMs: Chapter 12 of [BB] Section 12.2
- N-Gram LMs: Chapter 3 of Speech and Language Processing; Section 3.1 on N-gram LM
- Maximum Likelihood: Chapter 2 of [BB] Sections 12.1 – 12.3
-
Lecture05/08/2025
ThursdayLecture 3: Recurrent LMsLecture Notes:
- Chapter 1 - Section 1 Pgs 32:42
Further Reads:
- Recurrent LMs: Chapter 8 of [JM]
- LSTM LMs: Paper Regularizing and Optimizing LSTM Language Models by Stephen Merity, Nitish Shirish Keskar, and Richard Socher published in ICLR 2018 enabling LSTMs to perform strongly on word-level language modeling
- High-Rank Recurrent LMs: Paper Breaking the Softmax Bottleneck: A High-Rank RNN Language Model by Zhilin Yang, Zihang Dai, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and William W. Cohen presented at ICLR 2018 proposing Mixture of Softmaxes (MoS) and achieving state-of-the-art results at the time
-
Lecture05/13/2025
TuesdayLecture 4: Context Extraction via Self-AttentionLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Transformer Paper: Paper Attention Is All You Need! published in 2017 that made a great turn in sequence processing
- Transformers: Chapter 9 of [JM]
- Transformers: Chapter 12 of [BB] Section 12.1
-
Lecture05/13/2025
TuesdayLecture 5: Transformer LMLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Transformer LMs: Chapter 12 of [BB] Section 12.3
- LLMs via Transformers: Chapter 10 of [JM]
-
Lecture05/15/2025
ThursdayLecture 6: LLM ExamplesLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- GPT-1: Paper Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training by Alec Radford et al. (OpenAI, 2018) that introduced GPT-1 and revived the idea of pretraining transformers as LMs followed by supervised fine-tuning
- GPT-2: Paper Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners by Alec Radford et al. (OpenAI, 2019) that introduces GPT-2 with 1.5B parameter trained on web text
- GPT-3: Paper Language Models are Few-Shot Learners by Tom B. Brown et al. (OpenAI, 2020) that introduces GPT-3, a 175B-parameter transformer LM
-
GPT-4: GPT-4 Technical Report by OpenAI (2023) that provides an overview of GPT-4’s capabilities
- The Pile: Paper The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling by Leo Gao et al. presented in 2020 introductin dataset The Pile
- Documentation Debt: Paper Addressing “Documentation Debt” in Machine Learning Research: A Retrospective Datasheet for BookCorpus by Jack Bandy and Nicholas Vincent published in 2021 discussing the efficiency and legality of data collection by looking into BookCorpus
-
Lecture05/15/2025
ThursdayLecture 7: Pre-training vs Fine-tuningLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- SSL: Paper Semi-supervised Sequence Learning by Andrew M. Dai et al. published in 2015 that explores using unsupervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning; this was an early solid work advocating pre-training idea for LMs
- GPT-1: Paper Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training by Alec Radford et al. (OpenAI, 2018) that introduced GPT-1 and revived the idea of pretraining transformers as LMs followed by supervised fine-tuning
-
Lecture05/15/2025
ThursdayLecture 8: Statistical View and LoRALecture Notes:
Further Reads:
-
Assignment05/20/2025
TuesdayAssignment #1 - Language Modeling released! -
Lecture05/20/2025
TuesdayLecture 9: Prompt DesignLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Chain-of-Thought: Paper Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models by Jason Wei et al. presented at NeurIPS in 2022 introducing chain-of-thought prompting
- Prefix-Tuning: Paper Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation by Xiang Lisa Li et al. presented at ACL in 2021 proposing prefix-tuning approach for prompting
- Prompt-Tuning: Paper The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning by B. Lester et al. presented at EMNLP in 2021 proposing the prompt tuning idea, i.e., learning to prompt
- Zero-Shot LLMs: Paper Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners by T. Kojima et al. presented at NeurIPS in 2022 studying zero-shot learning with LLMs
-
Lecture05/20/2025
TuesdayLecture 10: Data Generation Problem - Basic DefinitionsLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Probabilistic Model: Chapter 2 of [BB] Sections 2.4 to 2.6
- Statistics: Chapter 3 of [M] Sections 3.1 to 3.3
-
Lecture05/22/2025
ThursdayLecture 11: Discriminative vs Generative Learning -
Lecture05/22/2025
ThursdayLecture 12: Naive Bayes - Most Basic Generative ModelLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Naive Bayes: Paper Idiot’s Bayes—Not So Stupid After All? by D. Hand and K. Yu published at Statistical Review in 2001 discussing the efficiency of Naive Bayes for classification
- Naive Bayes vs Linear Regression: Paper On Discriminative vs. Generative Classifiers: A Comparison of Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes by A. Ng and M. Jordan presented at NeurIPS in 2001 elaborating the data-efficiency efficiency of Naive Bayes and asymptotic superiority of Logistic Regression
- Generative Models – Overview: Chapter 20 of [M] Sections 20.1 to 20.3
-
Lecture05/27/2025
TuesdayLecture 13: Explicit Distribution Learning - SamplingLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Sampling Overview: Chapter 14 of [BB]
- Sampling The book Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Christopher Bishop. Read Chapter 11 to know about how challenging sampling from a distribution is
- Sampling Methods: Chapter 17 of [GYC] Sections 17.1 and 17.2
-
Lecture05/27/2025
TuesdayLecture 14: Maximum Likelihood LearningLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- KL Divergence and MLE: Chapter 5 of [M] Sections 5.1 to 5.2
- MLE: Chapter 5 of [GYC] Section 5.5
- Maximum Likelihood Learning The book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms by David MacKay which discusses MLE for clustering in Chapter 22
-
Lecture05/27/2025
TuesdayLecture 15: Autoregressive Modeling -
Lecture05/29/2025
ThursdayLecture 16: Computational AR Models -
Lecture05/29/2025
ThursdayLecture 17: PixelRNNLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- PixelRNN and PixelCNN: Paper Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks by A. Oord et al. presented at ICML in 2016 proposing PixelRNN and PixelCNN
-
Lecture06/03/2025
TuesdayLecture 18: Masked AR Models - PixelCNN and ImageGPTLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- PixelRNN and PixelCNN: Paper Pixel Recurrent Neural Networks by A. Oord et al. presented at ICML in 2016 proposing PixelRNN and PixelCNN
- ImageGPT: Paper Generative Pretraining from Pixels by M. Chen et al. presented at ICML in 2020 proposing ImageGPT
-
Lecture06/03/2025
TuesdayLecture 19: Energy Based Models - Boltzmann DistributionLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- EBMs: Chapter 24 of [M]
- Partition Function and Normalizing: Chapter 16 of [GYC] Section 16.2
- Universality of EBMs Paper Representational power of restricted Boltzmann machines and deep belief networks, by N. Le Roux and Y. Bengio published at Neural Computation in 2008 elaborating the representational power of EBMs *Tutorial on EBMs Survey A Tutorial on Energy-Based Learning, by Y. LeCun et al. published in 2006
-
Lecture06/05/2025
ThursdayLecture 20: Computational EBMs - Training and SamplingLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- EBMs: Chapter 24 of [M]
- Partition Function and Normalizing: Chapter 16 of [GYC] Section 16.2 *Tutorial on EBMs Survey A Tutorial on Energy-Based Learning, by Y. LeCun et al. published in 2006
-
Lecture06/05/2025
ThursdayLecture 21: MCMC Algorithms - Gibbs SamplingLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- MCMC Algorithms: Chapter 12 of [M] Sections 12.3, 12.6 and 12.7
- Gibbs Sampling and Langevin: Chapter 14 of [BB]
- Anatomy of MCMC Paper On the Anatomy of MCMC-Based Maximum Likelihood Learning of Energy-Based Models published by E. Nijkamp et al. in AAAI 2020 looking on the stability of training by MCMC algorithms
-
Due06/05/2025 23:59
ThursdayAssignment #1 due -
Lecture06/10/2025
TuesdayLecture 22: MCMC - Langevin and Conservative DivergenceLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Gibbs Sampling and Langevin: Chapter 14 of [BB]
- Conservative Divergence Paper Training Products of Experts by Minimizing Contrastive Divergence, by G. Hinton published at Neural Computation in 2002 proposing the idea of Conservative Divergence
- Training by MCMC Paper Implicit Generation and Generalization in Energy-Based Models published by Y. Du and I. Mordatch in NeurIPS 2019 discussing efficiency of MCMC algorithms for EBM training
- Improved CD Paper Improved Contrastive Divergence Training of Energy-Based Models published by Y. Du et al. in ICML 2021 proposing an efficient training based on Hinton’s CD ideal
-
Lecture06/10/2025
TuesdayLecture 23: Latent Space -
Lecture06/10/2025
TuesdayLecture 24: Normalizing Flow -
Lecture06/12/2025
ThursdayLecture 25: Learning FlowLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Flow-based Models: Chapter 23 of [M]
- Tutorial on Normalizing Flow Paper Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference published by G. Papamakarios et al. at JMLR in 2021 discussing the training and inference of flow-based models
-
Lecture06/12/2025
ThursdayLecture 26: NICE, RealNVP and GlowLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- NICE Paper NICE: Non-linear Independent Components Estimation published by L. Dinh et al. at ICLR in 2015 proposing the NICE model
- Real NVP Paper Density estimation using Real NVP published by L. Dinh et al. at ICLR in 2017 proposing the Real NVP model
- Glow Paper Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions published by D. Kingma and P. Dhariwal at NeurIPS in 2018 proposing the Glow model
-
Lecture06/12/2025
ThursdayLecture 27: Introduction to GANLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Tutorial on GANs Tutorial Generative Adversarial Networks given by I. Goodfellow at NeurIPS in 2016
-
Assignment06/17/2025
TuesdayAssignment #2 - Explicit Methods for Generation released! -
Lecture06/17/2025
TuesdayLecture 28: Vanilla GANLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- GANs Paper Generative Adversarial Nets published by I. Goodfellow et al. at NeurIPS in 2014 proposing GANs
-
Lecture06/17/2025
TuesdayLecture 29: Implicit MLE via GANLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- GANs Paper Generative Adversarial Nets published by I. Goodfellow et al. at NeurIPS in 2014 proposing GANs
- Tutorial on GANs Tutorial Generative Adversarial Networks given by I. Goodfellow at NeurIPS in 2016
-
Lecture06/19/2025
ThursdayLecture 30: Wasserstein DistanceLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- W-GANs Paper Wasserstein GAN published by M. Arjovsky et al. at ICML in 2017 proposing Wasserstein GANs
- Tutorial on GANs Tutorial Generative Adversarial Networks given by I. Goodfellow at NeurIPS in 2016
-
Lecture06/19/2025
ThursdayLecture 31: Wasserstein GANLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- W-GANs Paper Wasserstein GAN published by M. Arjovsky et al. at ICML in 2017 proposing Wasserstein GANs
-
Lecture06/19/2025
ThursdayLecture 32: GAN SamplesLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- DCGAN Paper Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks published by A. Radford et al. at ICLR in 2016 proposing DCGAN
- StyleGAN Paper A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks published by T. Karras et al. at IEEE CVF in 2019 proposing Style GAN
- BigGAN Paper Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis published by A. Brock et al. at ICLR in 2019 proposing BigGAN
- SAGAN Paper Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks published by H. Zhang et al. at ICML in 2019 proposing Self-Attention GAN
-
Exam06/24/2025 18:00
TuesdayMidtermTopics:
- The exam covers Chapters 1 to 3
- The exam is 3 hours long
- No programming questions
- Starts at 6:00 PM in EX-320
-
Lecture07/03/2025
ThursdayLecture 33: Probabilistic Latent-Space GenerationLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- Probabilistic Latent: Chapter 16 of [BB] Sections 16.1 and 16.2
- Mixture Models Paper On the number of components in a Gaussian mixture model published by G. McLachlan and S. Rathnayake in 2014 reviewing some key properties of Gaussian mixtures and their approximation power
-
Lecture07/03/2025
ThursdayLecture 34: Variational InferenceLecture Notes:
Further Reads:
- ELBO: Chapter 16 of [BB] Section 16.3
- VI for Likelihood The early paper Computing Upper and Lower Bounds on Likelihoods in Intractable Networks published by T. Jaakkola and M. Jordan at UAI in 1996
- Tutorials on VI Review paper Variational Inference: A Review for Statisticians published by D. Blei, A. Kucukelbir, and J. McAuliffe in 2016 giving a good overview on VI framework
- Introduction to VI Book An Introduction to Variational Autoencoders written by D. Kingma and M. Welling and published by NOW in 2019
-
Assignment07/05/2025
SaturdayProject Briefing released! -
Due07/07/2025 23:59
MondayAssignment #2 due -
Due07/16/2025 23:59
WednesdayProject Briefing due
Tutorial Schedule
Session | Topics | Tutor |
Tutorial 1 | PyTorch Overview -- Tokenization and Embedding | A. Mobasheri |
Tutorial 2 | Transformers and Large Language Models | A. Mobasheri |
Tutorial 3 | Auto-regressive Models | M. Safavi |
Tutorial 4 | Energy-based Models | A. Mobasheri |
Tutorial 5 | Generative Adversarial Networks | Exam Overview | M. Safavi |
Reading Week & Exam - No Lecture | N/A | |
Tutorial 6 | Variational Inference and VAEs | A. Mobasheri |
Tutorial 7 | Diffusion Models I | M. Safavi |
Tutorial 8 | Sample Project Demo | A. Mobasheri |
Tutorial 9 | Diffusion Models II | M. Safavi |
Tutorial 10 | Advances and Practical Considerations | M. Safavi |