| Date | Topic / Deadlines |
|---|---|
| Tue 13 Jan | Topic 1: Running an LLM LLM overview, open models, datasets Presentation: Overview of LLMs Paper: Small Language Models are the Future of Agentic AI. Peter Belcak et al., NVIDEA Research, 2025. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.02153 ▶️ Podcast generated by NoteGPT |
| Thu 15 Jan | |
| Tue 20 Jan | Topic 2: Agent Frameworks LangGraph Presentation: Agent Frameworks |
| Thu 22 Jan | |
| Tue 27 Jan | Topic 3: Agent Tool Use Ollama, Claude, OpenAI tool format Presentation: Tools Class is online, see home page for Zoom details Sign up with your work partner from last week for a breakout room here. Paper: Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools Timo Schick et al., 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 ▶️ Podcast generated by NotebookLLM by Google |
| Thu 29 Jan | Class is online, see home page for Zoom details Breakout rooms are the same as for the previous class. |
| Tue 03 Feb | Topic 4: Exploring Tools ToolNode, LangGraph's built-in tool library Presentation: Exploring Tools |
| Thu 05 Feb | |
| Tue 10 Feb | Topic 5: Retrieval Augmented Generation Vector databases, RAG pipeline, chunking Presentation: RAG |
| Thu 12 Feb | Topic 6: Vision-Language Models (VLM) CLIP, model alignment, image embeddings, other image tools Presentation: vlm_part1, vlm_part2, vlm_part3 |
| Tue 17 Feb | |
| Tue 24 Feb | Catch-Up Week, no class! Please use the time to finish your Portfolio! I will be reading them over Spring Break! Get your GitHub portfolio pages ready for your meeting with me! Make sure the link to your GitHub repository is here Sign up for your mid-term one-on-one review Sign up for in-person slots Sign up for Zoom slots The dates for the reviews are: Tue 10 March 3:30-4:30 in person Wed 11 March 12:30-2:00 by Zoom Thu 12 March 3:30-4:30 in person Tue 17 March 3:30-4:30 in person Wed 18 March 12:30-2:00 by Zoom Thu 19 March 3:30-4:30 in person |
| Thu 26 Feb | Catch-Up Week, no class! Please use the time to finish your Portfolio! I will be reading them over Spring Break! Get your GitHub portfolio pages ready for your meeting with me! Make sure the link to your GitHub repository is here |
| Tue 03 Mar | Spring Break |
| Thu 05 Mar | Spring Break |
| Tue 10 Mar | Topic 7: MCP and A2A Model Context Protocol, tool discovery, tool use, Asta from AI2, Agent-to-Agent protocol, toolagent cards, ngrok Presentation: MCP and A2A Run test ngrok on your computer before Thursday! |
| Thu 12 Mar | Class cancelled today Sign up your 1 or 2 person team for your final project here, with your team name and the names of the team members. Let me know if you need help finding a team partner! |
| Tue 17 Mar | Topic 7 Continued: A2A Topic 8: LLM Fine-Tuning Presentation: Fine-Tuning Kinds of fine-tuning, QLORA, using Tinker Install tinker and login to your account before class! |
| Thu 19 Mar | |
| Tue 24 Mar | Topic 9: Context Management Compression, selection, persistence No exercises, continue work on your final project! |
| Thu 26 Mar | Topic 10: Understanding Chain of Thought CoT prompts, tokenized CoT, hidden-layer CoT No exercises, continue work on your final project! |
| Tue 31 Mar | Topic 11: Coding Agents Frontier coding agents, AlphaEvolve, EvoSkill, NVIDIA AVO No exercises, continue work on your final project! |
| Thu 02 Apr | Topic 12: Personal Agents and Distilling ClawdBot, OpenClaw, Null Claw, CoPaw, OpenClaw-RL No exercises, continue work on your final project! |
| Tue 07 Apr | Topic 13: Agentic AI for Science Orchestral AI, HEPTAPOD, AutoDiscovery No exercises, continue work on your final project! |
| Thu 09 Apr | Topic 14: Agentic AI for Mathematics and Verification Guest lecture: Prof. Kevin Sullivan AlphaProof, AlphaDiscovery, Lean Co-Pilot, APOLLO, CLEVER No exercises, continue work on your final project! |
| Tue 14 Apr | Topic 15: Visual Reasoning Diffusion transformers, chain of frames, chain of steps No exercises, continue work on your final project! |
| Thu 16 Apr | Final project 5-minute videos due by 12 noon today in your GitHub portfolio. Final Project Presentations |
| Tue 21 Apr | Final Project Presentations |
| Thu 23 Apr | No class - instructor out of town |
| Tue 28 Apr | Final Project Presentations |
| Fri 15 May | Reports due in GitHub archives - no extensions! Markdown, pdf, or Word formats Report should be self-contained - should not be necessary to read other files Report sections: Motivation - why you built it Methods - how you built it Evaluation - how well did it work Conclusions - what did you learn Evaluation can be either Quantitative - compare your method and some other on benchmark sets Qualitative - ask a few people to use and rate your system Your GitHub archive should also contain a copy of your code and examples inputs/outputs |