• CS 598 (Spring 2024): Principles of Generative AI: Recent advancements in generative AI have equipped machine learning algorithms with the ability to learn from and accurately replicate observed data, creating new, similar data instances. This course provides an in-depth exploration of the key algorithmic developments in generative models, together with their underlying mathematical principles. We will cover a range of topics such as normalizing flows, variational autoencoders, Langevin algorithms, generative adversarial networks, diffusion models, and sequence generation models, etc.


  • CS 598 (Fall 2024): Machine Learning Algorithms for Large Language Models: This course is a general overview of machine learning algorithms used in the current development of large language models (LLMs). It covers a relatively broad range of topics, starting with mathematical models for sequence generation, and important neural network architectures with a focus on transformers. We will then investigate variants of transformer based language models, along with algorithms for prompt engineering and improving reasoning capability. Other topics include ML techniques used in studying LLM safety, hallucination, fine-tuning of LLMs, alignment (reinforcement learning from human feedback), multimodal LLMs, and common methods for accelerating training and inference.


  • CS 446 (Spring 2025): Machine Learning: The goal of machine learning is to develop algorithms and models that enable computers to learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed for a particular task. In this course, we will cover the common algorithms and models encountered in both traditional machine learning and modern deep learning, those in unsupervised learning, supervised learning, and reinforcement learning. The algorithms that we will cover include $k$-means, Gaussian mixture models, expectation maximization, decision trees, Naive Bayes, linear regression, logistic regression, support vector machines, kernel methods, boosting, learning theory, common neural network architectures including FCN, CNN, RNN, LSTM, Transformer, and training algorithms, basic reinforcement learning algorithms such as Q-learning and policy gradient.