Announcements

Teaching Team

Grading Policy

Note: more details regarding the grading policy will be discussed in the first lecture.

• Attendance & Participation: 8% (+2% survey)
• Assignments (Individual): 30% (10% each)
• In-class Quizzes: 30% (15% each)
• Final (Group) Project: 30%

Class Information

Lectures: Room 2.505

• Monday: 1:00PM – 3:00PM
• Tuesday: 1:30PM – 3:30PM
• Note: No recording or streaming, please come!

Cohorts: Room 1.416

• CI01: Tuesday 9:30AM – 10:30AM
• CI02: Thursday 4:00PM – 5:00PM
• Note: Cohorts only in certain weeks, check schedule below

Course Schedule

Note: Schedule is tentative and subject to change!
Materials: Lecture slides and cohort materials can be found on Edimension platform.

Week	Date	Topics	Materials / Readings	Cohorts	Deadlines
1	15-Sep	Course Logistics Introduction to NLP	1. Stanford CS231n notes on network architectures 2. Stanford CS231n notes on backprop	-	-
2	22-Sep	Recap on ML/NN Word Vectors	1. Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space (original word2vec paper) 2. The Illustrated Word2vec 3. word2vec Parameter Learning Explained	-	Release A1
3	29-Sep	Words and Tokens Language Model	1. N-gram Language Models 2. BPE tutorial by Hugging Face	Word2Vec Tutorial	A1 Due
4	6-Oct	Quiz-1 RNN and Variants	1. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks 2. Understanding LSTM Networks (a nice blog post)	-	-
5	13-Oct	Seq2Seq & Attention 1 Seq2Seq & Attention 2	1. Attention Is All You Need 2. The Illustrated Transformer	-	Release A2
6	20-Oct	Transformer Project Announce	-	Transformer Tutorial	A2 Due
7	27-Oct	Recess Week
8	3-Nov	LLM Pre-training Post-training (SFT/RLHF)	-	-	-
9	10-Nov	Project Proposal Presentation Efficient Adaptation	-	LLM Tutorial	-
10	17-Nov	Benchmark & Evaluation Quiz-2	-	-	Release A3
11	24-Nov	Advanced Topic-1 Advanced Topic-2	-	Help on Project	A3 Due
12	1-Dec	Advanced Topic-3 Advanced Topic-4	-	-	-
13	8-Dec	Final Project Presentations