Week 9: LLM Post-training

Reminders and announcements

• Solutions to Tutorial 3 are now available.
• Reminder that there are extra help hours this week for the assignment.
• You can find the instructions for submitting the assignment on Learn under "Assessment" (link).

Overview of the week

Welcome to Week 9! As we near the end of the semester, it's always a difficult time of year. I expect that many of you (like us) are feeling the strain of working hard for so long; you probably have several coursework deadlines coming up, and of course, the weather is colder and darker as well. So, you will probably be glad to hear that this week wraps up all the mandatory technical content for ANLP! From next week, you will be able to focus entirely on submitting your assignment and starting preparations for the final exam.

In the first lecture this week, Edoardo will explore the challenges of creating Large Language Models not just for English, but for many of the languages spoken around the world. The second and third lectures will be delivered by Alessandro Suglia (AS), who is our 3rd lecturer for ANLP. These lectures will focus on LLM post-training: a training phase that takes place after unsupervised pre-training and aims at endowing LLM with the ability to follow natural language instructions, align with human preferences, and enhance reasoning abilities.

Lectures and readings