| Week | Date | Topic | Readings | Presenter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| W1 | 8/25 | Course Overview | Instructor | |
| 8/27 | Natural Language Processing Basics | Instructor | ||
| W2 | 9/1 | Labor Day (No Class) | ||
| 9/3 | Natural Language Processing Basics | Instructor | ||
| W3 | 9/8 | Natural Language Processing Basics | Instructor | |
| 9/10 | Natural Language Processing Basics | Instructor | ||
| 9/11 | LaTeX Assignment Due | |||
| W4 | 9/15 | Human Preference Alignment | Instructor | |
| 9/17 | Human Preference Alignment | Instructor | ||
| W5 | 9/22 | Bias Detection and Mitigation | Instructor | |
| 9/24 | AI-Generated Text Detection | Instructor | ||
| W6 | 9/29 | Adversarial Attacks and Defenses | Instructor | |
| 10/1 | Adversarial Attacks and Defenses | Instructor | ||
| 10/2 | Literature Review Due | |||
| W7 | 10/6 | Robustness of Multimodal Models | Instructor | |
| 10/8 | Robustness of Multimodal Models | Instructor | ||
| 10/9 | Proposal Due | |||
| W8 | 10/13 | Fall Break (No Class) | ||
| 10/15 | Invited Talk | |||
| W9 | 10/20 | Project Highlight Presentations | ||
| 10/22 | In-Context Example Selection | Student | ||
| W10 | 10/27 | Position Bias |
Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts, TACL 2023 Found in the Middle: Calibrating Positional Attention Bias Improves Long Context Utilization, ACL-Findings 2024 Found in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts Better via Plug-and-Play Positional Encoding, NeurIPS 2024 Eliminating Position Bias of Language Models: A Mechanistic Approach, ICLR 2025 |
Student |
| 10/29 | Long-Context Language Models |
Focused Transformer: Contrastive Training for Context Scaling, NeurIPS 2023 Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation, arXiv 2023 LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models, NAACL 2024 YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models, ICLR 2024 |
Student | |
| W11 | 11/3 | Hallucinations | Student | |
| 11/5 | Model Uncertainty | Student | ||
| 11/6 | Midterm Report Due | |||
| W12 | 11/10 | Model Explainability | Student | |
| 11/12 | Model Reasoning | Student | ||
| W13 | 11/17 | Model Editing |
Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT, NeurIPS 2022 Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer, ICLR 2023 PMET: Precise Model Editing in a Transformer, AAAI 2024 A Unified Framework for Model Editing, EMNLP-Findings 2024 |
Student |
| 11/19 | Tool-Augmented Language Models | Student | ||
| W14 | 11/24 | Invited Talk | ||
| 11/26 | Reading day (No Class) | |||
| W15 | 12/1 | Project Presentations | ||
| 12/3 | Project Presentations | |||
| W16 | 12/9 | Final Report Due |