Schedule

Event

Date

Description

Course Material
Lecture

01/13/2026
Tuesday

Origins of LLMs
[slides]
Readings:
- Bengio et al. 2003. “A Neural Probabilistic Language Model”
- Jurafsky and Martin textbook chapter on noisy channel models
Lecture

01/15/2026
Thursday

Natural language understanding vs generation
[slides]

Readings:
Assignment

01/17/2026
Saturday

Assignment #1 released

[Prompting, Finetuning, Retrieval, and Embeddings]
Lecture

01/20/2026
Tuesday

The science of prompting
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

01/22/2026
Thursday

Deciding when to finetune and finetuning efficiently
[slides]

Readings:
Due

01/22/2026 23:59
Thursday

Initial Pitch due
Lecture

01/27/2026
Tuesday

Learning representations and embeddings
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

01/29/2026
Thursday

Retrieval 1: Storing and retrieving knowledge
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

02/03/2026
Tuesday

Retrieval 2: Retrieval augmented generation, deep research
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

02/05/2026
Thursday

Chatbots 1: Task-oriented Chatbots
[slides]

Readings:
Assignment

02/05/2026
Thursday

Assignment #2 released

[Chatbots, Agents, and Assistants]
Due

02/05/2026 14:00
Thursday

Assignment #1 due
Lecture

02/10/2026
Tuesday

Chatbots 2: Chitchat, personas, and companionship
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

02/12/2026
Thursday

Agents 1: Tool calling, security risks
[slides]

Readings:
Due

02/12/2026 23:59
Thursday

Proposal due
Lecture

02/17/2026
Tuesday

Agents 2: Multi-agent systems
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

02/19/2026
Thursday

Writing and ideation assistants and AI creative writing
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

02/24/2026
Tuesday

LLMs for evaluation 1: automatic evaluation, AI-as-judge
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

02/26/2026
Thursday

LLMs for evaluation 2: Synthetic data generation, simulation
[slides]

Readings:
Assignment

02/26/2026
Thursday

Assignment #3 released

[Language Models beyond Natural Language]
Assignment

02/26/2026
Thursday

Final Project released

[Final Project]
Due

02/26/2026 14:00
Thursday

Assignment #2 due
No class

03/03/2026
Tuesday

Spring Break
No class

03/05/2026
Thursday

Spring Break
Lecture

03/10/2026
Tuesday

Misuse of LLMs -- adversarial attacks on and enabled by LLMs
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

03/12/2026
Thursday

Legal and safety considerations around LLM applications
[slides]

Readings:
Due

03/12/2026 23:59
Thursday

Midpoint check-in due
Lecture

03/17/2026
Tuesday

[tentative] Code-writing assistants
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

03/19/2026
Thursday

[tentative] Image generation and conversing about images
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

03/24/2026
Tuesday

LLMs for Non-English Languages and non-American Cultures
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

03/26/2026
Thursday

[tentative] LLMs for healthcare
[slides]

Readings:
Due

03/26/2026 14:00
Thursday

Assignment #3 due
Lecture

03/31/2026
Tuesday

LLMs for biological understanding (guest lecture by Prof Lei Li)
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

04/02/2026
Thursday

Music generation (guest lecture by Prof Chris Donahue)
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

04/07/2026
Tuesday

[tentative] LLMs and finance
[slides]

Readings:
No class

04/09/2026
Thursday

Carnival
Lecture

04/14/2026
Tuesday

[tentative] Robots and embodied AI
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

04/16/2026
Thursday

[tentative] Efficient, large-scale serving of LLMs
[slides]

Readings:
Lecture

04/21/2026
Tuesday

Project presentations
[slides]

Readings:
Due

04/21/2026 14:00
Tuesday

Final Report and Presentation due
Lecture

04/23/2026
Thursday

Project presentations
[slides]

Readings: