Epistemic Noise

Notes

Two minutes. Then you know a little more.

NLP boiled down. From foundations to advanced techniques, simplified and packed into a short note.

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54 notes

2 min

GPU utilization is the wrong question

Seeing 95% GPU utilization feels reassuring. The expensive hardware is busy, so the workload must be well optimized.

2 min

The evaluation set becomes part of the product

The first evaluation set for an AI system is usually built before anyone knows how the system will fail.

2 min

False positives are an architecture decision

A similarity threshold looks like a model parameter until the system gives it consequences.

2 min

When the model stops being the bottleneck

A machine learning project can change character without changing its model.

2 min

Speaker embeddings

Speaker embeddings make voice matching look almost trivial.

2 min

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)

Suppose you show someone two responses to the same prompt and ask which one they prefer.

2 min

Prompt injection and guardrails

Prompt injection becomes much more consequential once a model can do something.

2 min

Serving LLMs in production

LLM inference is partly a scheduling and memory problem disguised as a model call.

2 min

Structured outputs

Free-form language is an excellent interface for people. It is usually a bad interface between software components.

2 min

RAG failure modes

RAG failures become easier to debug once “RAG quality” stops being treated as one thing.

2 min

Evaluating LLM products

The useful unit of evaluation for an LLM product is usually not the completion. It is the task.

2 min

Tool-calling agents

Function calling gives a model an interface to software. An agent appears when you put that capability inside a control loop.

2 min

Mixed Precision vs. Quantization

Mixed precision and quantization are two techniques that can significantly reduce the memory and computational requirements of AI models.

2 min

Prompt Chaining

Prompt chaining is a technique that involves combining multiple prompts to generate more complex and nuanced responses from AI models.

2 min

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)

RLHF is a method that incorporates human feedback into the training process of AI models. Unlike traditional training, which relies solely on datasets and metrics, RLHF uses human evaluators to guide the model's learning.

2 min

Vector Databases in NLP

Vector databases are a powerful tool for storing and querying high-dimensional vectors. They are very useful in comparison and search tasks in NLP

2 min

Exploring LangChain

LangChain is a tool for building AI applications. It simplifies the process by making it easier to connect and manage the various components.

2 min

The Art of Fine-Tuning

Finetuning is the magic wand that transforms a general-purpose AI model into a domain-specific maestro.

2 min

How Prompt Engineering Shapes AI Interactions

Prompt engineering is the art of crafting the perfect question or instruction to elicit the desired response from an AI model.

2 min

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

RAG combines the best of both worlds: the vast knowledge of a search engine and the creative storytelling of a language model.

2 min

OpenAI Function Calling

Imagine asking your AI assistant to not only remind you of an upcoming meeting but also to book the venue, send invitations, and update your calendar, all seamlessly.

2 min

Optimizing Transformer Architectures for Specific NLP Tasks

Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), offering remarkable results across a wide range of tasks.

2 min

Analyzing Attention Maps in Transformer Models

At its core, the attention mechanism allows Transformers to focus on different parts of input sequences when processing data. Attention maps are essentially heatmaps

2 min

Gradient Accumulation in Training Large NLP Models

Gradient accumulation is a technique that allows us to train large NLP models with limited memory. It involves splitting the training batch into smaller batches

2 min

Cross-Lingual NLP: Challenges and Solutions

Cross-lingual NLP is a field that aims to develop models that can process text in multiple languages. It has many applications, from machine translation to sentiment analysis

2 min

Evaluating NLP Models: Metrics and Benchmarks

Evaluating NLP models is a crucial step in the model development process. It allows us to determine whether a model is performing as expected and identify areas for improvement

2 min

Data Collators in Machine Learning

At its core, a data collator is an object that assembles a batch of data from a list of dataset elements. These elements share the same data type as those of the training or evaluation.

2 min

Causal vs. Masked Language Modeling

In the realm of CLM, language models are trained with a unidirectional focus. This means that the model's training objective is to predict the next word or token in a sequence

2 min

Packing in Transformer Models

Packing involves concatenating multiple tokenized sequences into a single input, which we can aptly refer to as a 'pack.' This method has become increasingly important as many datasets exhibit skewed length distributions.

2 min

Quantization: Shrinking Model Sizes for Efficient AI

Quantization involves performing computations and storing tensors at lower bitwidths than traditional floating-point precision, effectively reducing the memory and processing requirements of AI models.

2 min

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)

LoRA is one of the widely used PEFT methods. Even in most cases when someone says PEFT, they typically mean LoRA only.

2 min

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT)

PEFT methods focus on fine-tuning only a limited subset of additional model parameters, significantly reducing both computational and storage requirements while maintaining performance similar to fully fine-tuned models.

2 min

Hugging Face: The Open-Source Hub for NLP

Hugging Face is an open-source platform that provides a treasure trove of pre-trained models for a wide range of NLP tasks.

2 min

Text Summarization Techniques in NLP

Text summarization is a technique that involves generating a shorter version of a given text while preserving its meaning and key points

2 min

Weights and Biases (W&B): The Ultimate Experiment Tracker

The pursuit of model development, training, and optimization often feels like a complex journey into uncharted territory.

2 min

Text Generation Models: From GPT to BERT

Text generation is a technique that involves generating text from a given input. It has many applications in NLP, including machine translation

2 min

Named Entity Recognition (NER): A Beginner's Guide

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a technique that involves identifying and classifying named entities in text data. It has many applications

2 min

BERT vs. RoBERTa: A Comparative Analysis

BERT and RoBERTa are two popular language models that have achieved state-of-the-art results across a wide range of NLP tasks. They were both developed by researchers at Facebook

2 min

BERT: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers

BERT is a state-of-the-art language model that has achieved remarkable results across a wide range of NLP tasks. It was developed by researchers at Google

2 min

Sequence-to-Sequence Learning: Architectures and Applications

Sequence-to-sequence learning is a technique that involves mapping an input sequence to an output sequence. It has many applications in NLP

2 min

Callbacks

Callbacks are specialized objects that play a crucial role in customizing the behavior of the training loop within the PyTorch Trainer. These objects offer a unique vantage point

2 min

Attention Mechanisms in NLP: A Mathematical Deep Dive

Attention mechanisms are a key component of many state-of-the-art NLP models. They allow the model to focus on specific parts of the input sequence

2 min

Understanding the Limitations and Challenges of Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing has come a long way in recent years, and its applications are becoming increasingly diverse and sophisticated. However, despite its rapid

2 min

The Science Behind NLP: A Look into Linguistics and Machine Learning

NLP is a field that combines computer science, linguistics, and machine learning to help computers understand, interpret, and generate human language.

2 min

Advanced Techniques for Handling Imbalanced NLP Datasets

Imbalanced datasets are a common challenge in NLP. This is because many real-world datasets are skewed towards a particular class or category

2 min

The Ethics of NLP: Exploring the Challenges of Bias and Privacy

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an exciting field that has seen rapid progress in recent years, thanks to advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

2 min

Introduction to Text Classification

Text classification is a natural language processing (NLP) technique that involves automatically categorizing text into different classes or categories.

2 min

How to Build an Effective Machine Translation System

Machine translation is the process of automatically translating text from one language to another. While the accuracy of machine translation has improved significantly in recent years

2 min

Getting Started with NLP

Getting started with NLP (Natural Language Processing) can be a daunting task, especially if you are new to the field. But fear not! With the right tools and mindset

2 min

Introduction to Text Similarity Metrics

Text similarity metrics are a class of algorithms that measure the similarity between two texts. They are commonly used in NLP tasks such as machine translation

2 min

What's Deep Learning

Deep learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence, has been making waves in technology and science. In this blog post, we'll break down

2 min

Deep Learning: The basics

Understanding essential concepts is essential. Let's embark on a journey through the core elements that power NLP with deep learning

2 min

NLP vs. Machine Learning: What's the Difference?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) are two commonly used terms in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). While they are related

2 min

Word Embeddings vs. Subword Tokenization in NLP

Word embeddings and subword tokenization are two popular techniques for representing text data in NLP. While they both have their advantages