Advanced Topics in Computer Science: Understanding Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have utterly transformed the field of natural language processing (NLP) in the last 3-4 years. They form the basis of state-of-art systems and become ubiquitous in solving a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks. With the unprecedented potential and capabilities, these models also give rise to new ethical and scalability challenges. This course aims to cover cutting-edge research topics centering around pre-trained language models.