Schedule

Date	Topic	Notes
Tue, Feb 3	Intro + Classical NLP refresher
Thu, Feb 5	Classical NLP / Word Representations
Tue, Feb 10	seq2seq and Attention
Thu, Feb 12	Transformers (MLM + decoder only)	HW1 released
Tue, Feb 17	[No class]
Thu, Feb 19	Evaluation and desiderata for modern LMs
Tue, Feb 24	Pretraining and Data Mixtures
Thu, Feb 26	Scaling Laws and Emergent Behavior	HW1 due, HW2 released
Tue, Mar 3	Reasoning models & post-training paradigms
Thu, Mar 5	Policy-gradient RL: REINFORCE, GRPO, PPO
Tue, Mar 10	Quiz 1
Thu, Mar 12	Non-PG alignment algorithms: SLiC, DPO, KTO
Tue, Mar 17	Neural information retrieval
Thu, Mar 19	Inference scaling	HW2 due, HW3 released
Tue, Mar 24	[Spring break]
Thu, Mar 26	[Spring break]
Tue, Mar 31	RAG, agents & tool use
Thu, Apr 2	LM programming & prompt optimization
Tue, Apr 7	More than you ever wanted to know about tokenization
Thu, Apr 9	Advanced architectures (MoE, Linear RNNs)	HW3 due
Tue, Apr 14	Efficient training and deployment
Thu, Apr 16	Text diffusion
Tue, Apr 21	Quiz 2
Thu, Apr 23	Science of LMs (training dynamics)
Tue, Apr 28	Safety
Thu, Apr 30	Interpretability
Tue, May 5	Human-AI interaction
Thu, May 7	Poster session
Tue, May 12	Poster session