Week 1
- Aug 25
- Introduction, Applications
- E 1, Probabilities (refresher only)
- HW0 out (due 8/29)
- paper selection out (due 9/8)
- project assignment out (due 9/22)
- Aug 27
- Aug 29
- HW0 due
Week 2
- Sep 1
- LABOR DAY NO CLASS
- HW1 out (due 9/19)
- Sep 3
- Linear Classifiers
- E 2.2, 2.3, 2.4. JM 4, app. B, Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques, Goldwater probability tutorial. The Perceptron (Rosenblatt 1958) (optional)
Week 3
- Sep 8
- Sep 10
- Sep 12
- Early Drop (no W, refund)
Week 4
- Sep 15
- Sep 17
- Sep 19
- HW1 due
Week 5
- Sep 22
- Pretrained language models (ELMo, BERT, and sentence similarity)
- JM 10 ELMo paper BERT paper Zoph Fine-Tuning paper Fine-Tuning demo
project proposal due
- Sep 24
- NO CLASS
Week 6
- Sep 29
- Prompting and Large Language Models
- JM 7 T5 LoRA Prefix Tuning T0
- Jinyi Ye - What Happened in LLMs Layers when Trained for Fast vs. Slow Thinking: A Gradient Perspective
- Questions by: Narges Ghasemi Ghaleh Bahmani
- Saba Hashemi Safaei - Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens
- Questions by: Yuxin Yang
- Jinyi Ye - What Happened in LLMs Layers when Trained for Fast vs. Slow Thinking: A Gradient Perspective
- HW2 out (due 10/18)
- Oct 1
- Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback: Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)
- JM 6, Ziegler RLHF Paper, DPO Paper
- Sadra Sabouri Halestani - HUMT DUMT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs
- Questions by: Nikunj Gupta
- Feiyu Zhu - Self-Instructed Derived Prompt Generation Meets In-Context Learning: Unlocking New Potential of Black-Box LLMs
- Questions by: Sichang (Stephen) He
- Sadra Sabouri Halestani - HUMT DUMT: Measuring and controlling human-like language in LLMs
Week 7
- Oct 6
- Efficient Inference
- Narges Ghasemi Ghaleh Bahmani - LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts
- Questions by: Tianming Guo
- Saeed Hedayatian - TreeRL: LLM Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Tree Search
- Questions by: Zhiyuan Gao
- Questions by: Tianming Guo
- Oct 8
- MEGA (Guest Lecture by Xuezhe Ma)
- Mega Paper Megalodon
- Daniel Ruiz - TokAlign: Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation via Token Alignment
- Questions by: Abhinav Vadhera
- Ardysatrio Haroen - Turning Trash into Treasure: Accelerating Inference of Large Language Models with Token Recycling
- Questions by: Chufan Shi
- Daniel Ruiz - TokAlign: Efficient Vocabulary Adaptation via Token Alignment
- Oct 10
- Mid Drop (No W, No refund)
Week 8
- Oct 13
- Agents (Guest Lecture by Tenghao Huang)
- WebArena, ToolLLM, Narrative Discourse, ReAct
- Kiarash Vaziri Goodarzi - TokenFormer: Rethinking Transformer Scaling with Tokenized Model Parameters
- Questions by: Matthew Finlayson
- Naga Vamsi Ramana Dinavahi - Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models
- Questions by: Danny Deng
- Kiarash Vaziri Goodarzi - TokenFormer: Rethinking Transformer Scaling with Tokenized Model Parameters
- Oct 15
- Ethics (Guest Lecture by Katy Felkner)
- The Social Impact of Natural Language Processing, Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP, Model Cards for Model Reporting
- Kaicheng Wang - MAIN-RAG: Multi-Agent Filtering Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Questions by: Ardysatrio Haroen
- Zhiyuan Gao - OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use
- Questions by: Naga Vamsi Ramana Dinavahi
- Kaicheng Wang - MAIN-RAG: Multi-Agent Filtering Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Oct 17
- HW 2 due
Week 9
- Oct 20
- Information Retrieval (IR) and Question Answering (QA)
- JM 11
- Faith Baca - Large Language Models Are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models
- Questions by: Sajjad Shahabi
- Ruth-Ann Armstrong - Biased LLMs can Influence Political Decision-Making
- Questions by: Saba Hashemi Safaei
- Faith Baca - Large Language Models Are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models
- Oct 22
- Machine Translation (MT)/Multilinguality slides1 slides2
- JM12 Weaver, Translation (1952)
- Tianwen Fu - Improving Factuality with Explicit Working Memory
- Questions by: Kaicheng Wang
- Nikunj Gupta - Reinforced IR: A Self-Boosting Framework For Domain-Adapted Information Retrieval
- Questions by: Faith Baca
- Tianwen Fu - Improving Factuality with Explicit Working Memory
Week 10
- Oct 27
- Dialogue
- JM 25, Appendix K
- Shixuan Li - Re-ranking Using Large Language Models for Mitigating Exposure to Harmful Content on Social Media Platforms
- Questions by: Jinyi Ye
- Shixuan Li - Re-ranking Using Large Language Models for Mitigating Exposure to Harmful Content on Social Media Platforms
- HW3 out (due 11/21)
- Oct 29
- Information Extraction
- JM17.3, 20
- Sajjad Shahabi - Integrating Audio, Visual, and Semantic Information for Enhanced Multimodal Speaker Diarization on Multi-party Conversation
- Questions by: Daniel Ruiz
- Tianming Guo - HotelMatch-LLM: Joint Multi-Task Training of Small and Large Language Models for Efficient Multimodal Hotel Retrieval
- Questions by: Shixuan Li
- Sajjad Shahabi - Integrating Audio, Visual, and Semantic Information for Enhanced Multimodal Speaker Diarization on Multi-party Conversation
Week 11
- Nov 3
- Multimodal NLP (Guest Lecture by Xuezhe Ma)
- Anzhe Cheng - SHuBERT: Self-Supervised Sign Language Representation Learning via Multi-Stream Cluster Prediction
- Questions by: Feiyu Zhu
- Gonglin Chen - SpaRE: Enhancing Spatial Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with Synthetic Data
- Questions by: Wenbin Teng
- Questions by: Feiyu Zhu
- Nov 5
- Spoken Language Processing (SLP) (Guest Lecture by Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri)
- JM 15
- Wenbin Teng - Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning
- Questions by: Kiarash Vaziri Goodarzi
- Chufan Shi - ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generation
- Questions by: Tianwen Fu
- Wenbin Teng - Improve Vision Language Model Chain-of-thought Reasoning
- Nov 7
Week 12
- Nov 10
- Mind Reading (Guest Lecture by Sam Nastase)
- Lydia Ignatova - Dehumanizing Machines: Mitigating Anthropomorphic Behaviors in Text Generation Systems
- Questions by: Gonglin Chen
- Sichang (Stephen) He - Learning to Rewrite: Generalized LLM-Generated Text Detection
- Questions by: Anzhe Cheng
- Questions by: Gonglin Chen
- Nov 12
- TBD (Guest Lecture by Robin Jia)
- Abhinav Vadhera - JailbreakRadar: Comprehensive Assessment of Jailbreak Attacks Against LLMs
- Questions by: Ruth-Ann Armstrong
- Yuxin Yang - A Troublemaker with Contagious Jailbreak Makes Chaos in Honest Towns
- Questions by: Sadra Sabouri Halestani
- Questions by: Ruth-Ann Armstrong
- Nov 14
- Late Drop (W, No refund)
Week 13
- Nov 17
- TBD
- Danny Deng - LocAgent: Graph-Guided LLM Agents for Code Localization
- Questions by: Saeed Hedayatian
- Matthew Finlayson - Geometric Signatures of Compositionality Across a Language Model’s Lifetime
- Questions by: Lydia Ignatova
- Questions by: Saeed Hedayatian
- Nov 19
- Discourse Slides
- Nov 21
- HW 3 due
Week 14
- Nov 24
- TBD Guest Lecture
- Nov 26
- THANKSGIVING BREAK; NO CLASS
Week 15
- Dec 1
- Project Presentations
- (10:00) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:22) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:44) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(11:06) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(11:28) TBD
Questions by: TBD
- Dec 4
- Project presentations
- (10:00) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:22) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(10:44) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(11:06) TBD
Questions by: TBD
(11:28) TBD
Questions by: TBD