schedule | CS 6804

Note: Since this is the first time the class is being taught, the schedule may adjust if we need more or less time on certain topics.

Date	Lecture	Readings
Transformers & Pretraining Scaling
1/21	Introduction & Transformers [ slides ]	No associated readings
1/26	No classes (canceled due to inclement weather)
1/28	Transformers (cont'd) [ slides ]	Vaswani et al. (2017) Attention Is All You Need Jay Alammar's blog The Illustrated GPT-2 (Visualizing Transformer Language Models)
2/2	Transformers (cont'd) [ slides ]	Devlin et al. (2018) BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding Raffel et al. (2019) Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer Radford et al. (2019) Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners
2/4	Pretraining scaling [ slides ]	Hoffmann et al. (2022) Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models [optional] Li et al. (2025) (Mis)Fitting: A Survey of Scaling Laws
2/9	Decoding and inference [ slides ]	Holtzman et al. (2019) The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration Brown et al. (2020) Language Models are Few-Shot Learners Wei et al. (2022) Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models Anthropic blog Effective context engineering for AI agents
2/11	Multimodal models [ slides ]	Dosovitskiy et al. (2020) An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale Bai et al. (2025) Qwen3-VL Technical Report
Efficient training & inference
2/16	Efficient training [ slides ]	Fedus et al. (2021) Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity Hu et al. (2021) LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models
2/18	Efficient training (cont'd) & inference [ slides ]	Dao et al. (2022) FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness Tandon et al. (2025) End-to-End Test-Time Training for Long Context
Post-training & Reinforcement Learning
2/23	Post-training [ slides ]	Wei et al. (2021) Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners Longpre et al. (2023) The Flan Collection: Designing Data and Methods for Effective Instruction Tuning Ouyang et al. (2022) Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback Bai et al. (2022) Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
2/25	Supervised policy training + Reinforcement learning [ slides ]	Rafailov et al. (2023) Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model Lambert (2026) (Chapter 6)
3/2	Reinforcement learning (cont'd) [ slides ]
Policy gradient algorithms (cont'd) + Large Reasoning Models
3/4	[ slides ]
Spring break
3/9	No classes
3/11	No classes
Agents & Compound AI systems
3/16	TBD [ slides ]
3/18	TBD [ slides ]
Student presentations & discussions
3/23	TBD [ slides ]
3/25	TBD [ slides ]
3/30	TBD [ slides ]
4/1	TBD [ slides ]
4/6	TBD [ slides ]
4/8	TBD [ slides ]
4/13	TBD [ slides ]
4/15	TBD [ slides ]
4/20	TBD [ slides ]
4/22	Tu traveling [ slides ]
4/27	TBD [ slides ]
4/29	TBD [ slides ]
Final exam
5/4	No classes
5/6	Exam (in-class) [ slides ]