LLM-based Assistants

  • Practical course about LLMs for advanced BA students

  • Theory & practical sessions with high involvement

  • 6 credits, pass/fail

Contents

  1. Summary

  2. Contents Overview

  3. Formats

  4. Target Audience

  5. Formalia

Summary

When they were first introduced, LLMs were mainly seen as seq2seq models exclusively for text generation: input text in — output text out. However, as LLMs evolved, their application domain quickly expanded, and they are now used for purposes few could have imagined: from powering websites and automating business processes to drug discovery. The central goals of this course are:

  1. to provide a comprehensive overview of how the LLMs are used in the real world;

  2. to teach you the basics of implementing LLM-based pipelines for various purposes.

While the course will focus mostly on the practical uses of LLMs, it will also briefly touch on ethical, societal, and broader considerations.

The course contents, slides, tasks, reading, etc. will be hosted in this webbook. Moodle will be used for administrative stuff.

Contents Overview

The course will consist of the intro (Weeks 1-2), the core topics (Weeks 3-12), and the wrap-up (Weeks 13-14). You can see the schedule in Topics Overview. Important: the schedule is preliminary and subject to changes!

Core Topics

Core topics are divided into two parts, one covering applications of LLMs in business and one - in science. In the first part, we will look at numerous business or business-related tasks automated with LLMs, focusing in more details on chatbots and code generation. The second part will concentrate on using LLMs in scientific research and will also shed some light on some less obvious scientific applications.

Intro & Wrap-up

Both intro and wrap-up will (superficially) address some less practical and more philosophical / societal aspects of LLMs. In particular, we will discuss such questions, as whether LLMs exhibit awareness, which impact they have on society and environment, and more.

Formats

Each week of the course will offer a theoretical and a practical session. Session formats are given below (each session will be one of those):

  • Theory:

    • Lectures. At the lectures, we will mostly discuss applications of LLMs in different fields (on the examples of existing solutions), how the respective solutions are built and how they function, what their limitations are etc. You are highly encouraged to engage in discussions and arguments, constructively criticize the solutions and suggest your improvements and edits. The lecture slides are released 2 hours prior to the lecture.

  • Practice:

    • Labs. In labs, we will practice technical skills by making toy LLM-based solutions. Labs tasks are released 3 days prior to the respective sessions.

    • Debates. The debates will be conducted on material of the sessions dedicated to philosophical / ethical etc. considerations (weeks 1 and 13). In the debates, a certain motion (position) will be debated over by two teams: one will support it (the affirmative) and one will oppose it (the negative). See Debates for more details. The debate motions are released 1 week in advance after the corresponding lecture.

    • Pitches. This format will simulate a presentation of a software product; there will be a group of students who had made a toy project that they will pitch to another students, and the latter will ask (mostly technical) questions about the solution. See Pitches for more details. The requirements to the features and deliverables of the product to pitch are released 3 weeks in advance.

Target Audience

The course is intended for advanced BA students of computational linguistics, who have interest in practical applications of LLMs. MA students cannot attend this course. Practical experience with programming in Python and applying LLMs are a prerequisite (more formally, you should have completed ISCL-BA06, ISCL-BA07, and ISCL-BA08 successfully). Knowledge in LangChain and LangGraph is encouraged.

Please note: that is not a programming course and we won’t stop on low-level details of implementation, so you will be expected to understand those on the fly (or to pick them up if necessary).

Formalia

This is a pass/fail course for 6 credits (there is no 9 credits option). The course is counted towards ISCL-BA-11 (Spezialisierungsmodul).

There will be 3 debates and 5 pitches throughout the course. Each student will have to participate in 1 debate (any side) and 2 pitches (once on each side) to complete it successfully. There will be no exam, and no in-person presence is required.