Schedule

When	What
Week 1	Fundamentals of LLM generation and basic prompting techniques
Tue, Jan 7	Topics: Generation hyperparameters; zero-shot and few-shot prompting; prompting for code. In-class Notebook Out: Programming Capabilities. Create an ACCESS account immediately.
Fri, Jan 10	Topics: High-level overview of Transformers and GPUs. Reading: StarCoder and Llama. Out: Reading 0. In-class: Inference on GPU.
Week 2
Tue, Jan 14	Topics: Prompt-writing activity; more prompting techniques. In-class Notebook
Fri, Jan 17	Topics: Introduction to Conversational Models. Due: Reading 0. Reading: InstructGPT and UltraFeedback
Week 3
Tue, Jan 21	Topics: What do models learn? In-class Notebook Due: Programming Capabilities. Out: Math Word Problems
Fri, Jan 24	Topics: Reading discussion; high-speed programming activity. Due: Reading 1.
Week 4
Tue, Jan 28	Topics: DeepSeek results
Fri, Jan 31	Topics: Introduction to agents In-Class Notebook No reading this week. Reading: SWE-Bench.
Week 5
Tue, Feb 4	Topics: The Act pattern In-Class Notebook Due: Math Word Problems
Fri, Feb 7	Topics: Information retrieval. Due: Reading 2. In-class Notebook Reading: s1: simple test-time scaling
Week 6
Tue, Feb 11	Topics: Neural retrieval. In-class Notebook. Recommended Reading: Speech and Language Processing Chapter 14. Out: Thomas the Travel Agent
Fri, Feb 14	Due: Reading 3. Out: Project Proposal
Week 7
Tue, Feb 18	Topics: Supervised fine-tuning.
Fri, Feb 21	Topics: Speculative decoding and proxy tuning. Due: Project Proposal
Week 8
Tue, Feb 25	Due: Thomas the Travel Agent
Fri, Feb 28
Week 9	Spring Break
Tue, Mar 4	No class
Fri, Mar 7	No class
Week 10
Tue, Mar 11
Fri, Mar 14
Week 11
Tue, Mar 18
Fri, Mar 21
Week 12
Tue, Mar 25
Fri, Mar 28
Week 13
Tue, Apr 1
Fri, Apr 4
Week 14
Tue, Apr 8
Fri, Apr 11
Week 15
Tue, Apr 15	Last day of class