Carnegie Mellon University
Large Language Model Applications
Spring 2026

Schedule

  • Event
    Date
    Description
    Course Material
  • Lecture
    01/13/2026
    Tuesday
    Origins of language models - speech and machine translation
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Assignment
    01/13/2026
    Tuesday
    Assignment #1 released
    [Prompting, Finetuning, Retrieval, and Embeddings]
  • Lecture
    01/15/2026
    Thursday
    Natural language understanding vs generation
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    01/20/2026
    Tuesday
    The science of prompting
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    01/22/2026
    Thursday
    Deciding when to finetune and finetuning efficiently
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    01/27/2026
    Tuesday
    Learning representations and embeddings
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    01/29/2026
    Thursday
    Retrieval 1: Storing and retrieving knowledge
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    02/03/2026
    Tuesday
    Retrieval 2: Retrieval augmented generation, deep research
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    02/05/2026
    Thursday
    Dialog 1: Task-oriented conversations
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Assignment
    02/05/2026
    Thursday
    Assignment #2 released
    [Chatbots, Agents, and Assistants]
  • Due
    02/05/2026 14:00
    Thursday
    Assignment #1 due
  • Lecture
    02/10/2026
    Tuesday
    Dialog 2: Chitchat, personas, and companionship
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    02/12/2026
    Thursday
    Agents 1: Tool use
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    02/17/2026
    Tuesday
    Agents 2
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    02/19/2026
    Thursday
    Writing and ideation assistants and AI creative writing
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    02/24/2026
    Tuesday
    LLMs for evaluation 1: automatic evaluation, AI-as-judge
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    02/26/2026
    Thursday
    LLMs for evaluation 2: Synthetic data generation, simulation
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Assignment
    02/26/2026
    Thursday
    Assignment #3 released
    [Language Models beyond Natural Language]
  • Assignment
    02/26/2026
    Thursday
    Final Project released
    [Final Project]
  • Due
    02/26/2026 14:00
    Thursday
    Assignment #2 due
  • No class
    03/03/2026
    Tuesday
    Spring Break
  • No class
    03/05/2026
    Thursday
    Spring Break
  • Lecture
    03/10/2026
    Tuesday
    Misuse of LLMs -- adversarial attacks on and enabled by LLMs
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    03/12/2026
    Thursday
    Legal and safety considerations around LLM applications
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    03/17/2026
    Tuesday
    Code-writing assistants
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    03/19/2026
    Thursday
    Image generation and conversing about images
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    03/24/2026
    Tuesday
    Music generation
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    03/26/2026
    Thursday
    LLMs for healthcare
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Due
    03/26/2026 14:00
    Thursday
    Assignment #3 due
  • Lecture
    03/31/2026
    Tuesday
    LLMs for biological understanding
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    04/02/2026
    Thursday
    LLMs and embodied AI
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    04/07/2026
    Tuesday
    LLMs and finance
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • No class
    04/09/2026
    Thursday
    Carnival
  • Lecture
    04/14/2026
    Tuesday
    Agents 3: Multi-agent systems
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    04/16/2026
    Thursday
    Efficient, large-scale serving of LLMs
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Lecture
    04/21/2026
    Tuesday
    Project presentations
    [slides]

    Readings:

  • Due
    04/21/2026 14:00
    Tuesday
    Final Project Due
  • Lecture
    04/23/2026
    Thursday
    Project presentations
    [slides]

    Readings: