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100 Complex LLM Terminology Explained in One Single & One Simple Sentenceby@thomascherickal
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100 Complex LLM Terminology Explained in One Single & One Simple Sentence

by Thomas CherickalApril 1st, 2024
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Ever lost your way in the Large Language Model (LLM) Multiverse because you did not know the meaning of finetinuning or autoregressive or GAN (the actual meaning)? Worry no more; we have you covered! Here is every technical term in the LLM world explained, twice(!), once as a definition, and once in ultra simple language (in case you're feeling confused).
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  1. Language Model: A statistical model that learns patterns and relationships in text data to generate human-like text.
  2. Transformer: A neural network architecture that uses self-attention mechanisms to process sequential data.
  3. GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer): A type of language model that generates text based on patterns learned from pre-training on large text datasets.
  4. Fine-tuning: The process of adapting a pre-trained language model to a specific task or domain by training it on a smaller dataset.
  5. Few-shot Learning: A learning approach where a model can learn from a small number of examples.
  6. Zero-shot Learning: A learning approach where a model can perform a task without any task-specific training examples.
  7. Prompt Engineering: The process of designing effective prompts to guide the language model in generating desired outputs.
  8. Tokenization: The process of breaking down text into smaller units called tokens, such as words or subwords.
  9. Embeddings: Dense vector representations of words or tokens that capture their semantic meaning.
  10. Attention: A mechanism that allows the model to focus on relevant parts of the input when generating output.
  11. Self-attention: A type of attention where the model attends to different parts of its own input.
  12. Multi-head Attention: An extension of self-attention that allows the model to attend to information from different representation subspaces.
  13. Positional Encoding: A technique used to inject information about the position of tokens in a sequence into the model.
  14. Layer Normalization: A technique used to normalize the activations of neurons in a layer to stabilize training.
  15. Residual Connection: A skip connection that allows information to bypass one or more layers in the network.
  16. Dropout: A regularization technique that randomly drops out neurons during training to prevent overfitting.
  17. Beam Search: A decoding algorithm that explores multiple probable sequences and selects the best one based on a scoring function.
  18. Nucleus Sampling: A decoding method that samples from the most probable tokens based on a probability threshold.
  19. Top-k Sampling: A decoding method that samples from the top k most probable tokens at each step.
  20. Perplexity: A metric that measures how well a language model predicts a sample of text.
  21. BLEU Score: A metric used to evaluate the quality of machine-generated text by comparing it to reference text.
  22. ROUGE Score: A set of metrics used to evaluate the quality of summarization models.
  23. Fluency: The ability of a language model to generate grammatically correct and coherent text.
  24. Coherence: The logical and consistent flow of ideas in the generated text.
  25. Diversity: The variety and uniqueness of the generated text, avoiding repetition and dullness.
  26. Hallucination: A phenomenon where the language model generates plausible but factually incorrect information.
  27. Bias: The tendency of a language model to generate text that reflects societal biases present in the training data.
  28. Toxicity: The presence of harmful, offensive, or discriminatory content in the generated text.
  29. Controllability: The ability to guide the language model's output based on specific attributes or constraints.
  30. Style Transfer: The task of rewriting text in a different style while preserving its content.
  31. Summarization: The task of generating a concise version of a longer text while retaining key information.
  32. Translation: The task of converting text from one language to another.
  33. Question Answering: The task of providing accurate answers to questions based on given context.
  34. Named Entity Recognition (NER): The task of identifying and classifying named entities (e.g., person, organization, location) in text.
  35. Sentiment Analysis: The task of determining the sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) expressed in a piece of text.
  36. Text Classification: The task of assigning predefined categories or labels to a given text.
  37. Text Generation: The task of generating human-like text based on a given prompt or context.
  38. Language Translation: The task of translating text from one language to another while preserving meaning.
  39. Text-to-Speech (TTS): The task of converting written text into spoken words.
  40. Speech-to-Text (STT): The task of converting spoken words into written text.
  41. Image Captioning: The task of generating a textual description of an image.
  42. Text-to-Image Generation: The task of generating an image based on a textual description.
  43. Knowledge Distillation: The process of transferring knowledge from a larger model to a smaller one.
  44. Quantization: The process of reducing the precision of model weights to reduce memory footprint and computational cost.
  45. Pruning: The process of removing unimportant weights or connections from a model to reduce its size.
  46. Federated Learning: A distributed learning approach where models are trained on decentralized data without sharing raw data.
  47. Differential Privacy: A technique used to protect the privacy of individuals in the training data.
  48. Adversarial Training: A technique used to improve a model's robustness by training it on adversarial examples.
  49. Transfer Learning: The process of leveraging knowledge learned from one task to improve performance on another related task.
  50. Multitask Learning: The process of training a model to perform multiple tasks simultaneously.
  51. Continual Learning: The ability of a model to learn new tasks without forgetting previously learned knowledge.
  52. Few-shot Adaptation: The process of adapting a pre-trained model to a new task with only a few examples.
  53. Meta-learning: The process of learning to learn, where a model learns a general strategy to adapt to new tasks quickly.
  54. Reinforcement Learning: A learning approach where an agent learns to make decisions by interacting with an environment and receiving rewards.
  55. Unsupervised Learning: A learning approach where the model learns patterns and structures from unlabeled data.
  56. Semi-supervised Learning: A learning approach that combines a small amount of labeled data with a large amount of unlabeled data.
  57. Self-supervised Learning: A learning approach where the model learns from automatically generated labels derived from the input data itself.
  58. Contrastive Learning: A learning approach that trains a model to distinguish between similar and dissimilar examples.
  59. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs): A framework where two models, a generator and a discriminator, compete against each other to generate realistic data.
  60. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs): A generative model that learns to encode data into a latent space and decode it back to the original space.
  61. Autoregressive Models: A type of model that predicts the next token in a sequence based on the previous tokens.
  62. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT): A pre-trained model that learns contextual representations of text using bidirectional training.
  63. Robustness: The ability of a model to maintain performance under various perturbations or adversarial attacks.
  64. Interpretability: The degree to which a model's decisions and predictions can be understood and explained.
  65. Explainability: The ability to provide human-understandable explanations for a model's predictions or decisions.
  66. Model Compression: Techniques used to reduce the size and computational requirements of a model while maintaining performance.
  67. Knowledge Graphs: Structured representations of real-world entities and their relationships.
  68. Entity Linking: The task of linking named entities in text to their corresponding entries in a knowledge base.
  69. Commonsense Reasoning: The ability of a model to make inferences based on general world knowledge.
  70. Multimodal Learning: The process of learning from multiple modalities, such as text, images, and audio.
  71. Cross-lingual Transfer: The ability to transfer knowledge learned in one language to another language with limited resources.
  72. Domain Adaptation: The process of adapting a model trained on one domain to perform well on a different but related domain.
  73. Active Learning: A learning approach where the model actively selects informative examples for labeling to improve performance.
  74. Curriculum Learning: A learning approach where the model is gradually exposed to more complex examples during training.
  75. Lifelong Learning: The ability of a model to continuously learn and adapt to new tasks and environments over its lifetime.
  76. Few-shot Generation: The task of generating new examples based on a small number of provided examples.
  77. Data Augmentation: Techniques used to increase the size and diversity of the training data by applying transformations or generating synthetic examples.
  78. Noisy Channel Modeling: A framework that models the generation process as a noisy channel and aims to recover the original input.
  79. Masked Language Modeling: A pre-training objective where the model learns to predict masked tokens in a sequence.
  80. Next Sentence Prediction: A pre-training objective where the model learns to predict whether two sentences follow each other in a coherent way.
  81. Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) Models: A type of model that maps an input sequence to an output sequence, commonly used for tasks like translation and summarization.
  82. Attention Mechanisms: Techniques used to allow the model to focus on relevant parts of the input when generating the output.
  83. Transformer-XL: An extension of the Transformer architecture that enables learning dependencies beyond a fixed-length context.
  84. XLNet: A pre-trained model that combines the benefits of autoregressive and bidirectional training.
  85. T5 (Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer): A pre-trained model that frames all tasks as text-to-text problems.
  86. GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3): A large-scale language model with 175 billion parameters, capable of performing various tasks with few-shot learning.
  87. Few-shot Prompting: The technique of providing a small number of examples or demonstrations in the prompt to guide the model's output.
  88. In-context Learning: The ability of a model to learn from examples provided within the input context without explicit fine-tuning.
  89. Prompt Tuning: A technique that optimizes continuous prompt embeddings while keeping the model parameters fixed.
  90. Prefix-tuning: A technique that prepends a small number of trainable parameters to the input sequence for task-specific adaptation.
  91. Adapter-based Tuning: A technique that inserts small trainable modules (adapters) between layers of a pre-trained model for task-specific adaptation.
  92. Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning: Techniques that fine-tune a small number of parameters while keeping most of the model fixed to reduce computational cost and memory footprint.
  93. Low-rank Adaptation: A technique that learns low-rank updates to the model parameters for task-specific adaptation.
  94. Sparse Fine-tuning: A technique that fine-tunes a sparse subset of the model parameters for task-specific adaptation.
  95. Multilingual Models: Models that are trained on multiple languages and can handle tasks in different languages.
  96. Code Generation: The task of generating programming code based on natural language descriptions or examples.
  97. Dialogue Systems: Models that engage in conversational interactions with users, understanding context and generating appropriate responses.
  98. Fact Checking: The task of verifying the accuracy of claims or statements against reliable sources of information.
  99. Text Style Transfer: The task of rewriting text in a different style (e.g., formal to informal) while preserving its content.
  100. Zero-shot Task Generalization: The ability of a model to perform tasks it was not explicitly trained on, based on its general language understanding capabilities.

Same Terminology, Even Simpler Terms

  1. Language Model: A computer program that can understand and create human-like text.
  2. Transformer: A type of language model that can process large amounts of text quickly.
  3. GPT: A type of language model that can generate text that sounds like it was written by a human.
  4. Fine-tuning: Teaching a language model to do a specific task, like writing stories or translating languages.
  5. Few-shot Learning: Teaching a language model to do a task with only a few examples.
  6. Prompt Engineering: Writing instructions that tell the language model what to do.
  7. Tokenization: Breaking down text into smaller pieces, like words or letters.
  8. Embeddings: Turning words into numbers that the language model can understand.
  9. Attention: The language model's ability to focus on important parts of the text.
  10. Self-attention: The language model's ability to pay attention to itself.
  11. Positional Encoding: Telling the language model where each word is in the text.
  12. Layer Normalization: Making sure the language model's output is consistent.
  13. Residual Connection: A shortcut that helps the language model learn faster.
  14. Dropout: Randomly turning off parts of the language model to prevent it from overfitting.
  15. Beam Search: A method for generating text that explores different possibilities.
  16. Nucleus Sampling: A method for generating text that focuses on the most likely words.
  17. Top-k Sampling: A method for generating text that chooses from the top k most likely words.
  18. Perplexity: A measure of how well the language model predicts the next word in a text.
  19. BLEU Score: A measure of how similar the language model's output is to human-written text.
  20. ROUGE Score: A measure of how well the language model summarizes text.
  21. Fluency: How smoothly and naturally the language model's output flows.
  22. Coherence: How well the language model's output makes sense.
  23. Diversity: How varied and unique the language model's output is.
  24. Hallucination: When the language model makes up information that isn't in the input text.
  25. Bias: When the language model's output reflects unfair or inaccurate stereotypes.
  26. Toxicity: When the language model's output is harmful or offensive.
  27. Controllability: How well the language model can follow specific instructions.
  28. Style Transfer: Changing the style of the language model's output, like from formal to informal.
  29. Summarization: Creating a shorter version of a text that captures the main points.
  30. Translation: Converting text from one language to another.
  31. Question Answering: Answering questions based on a given text.
  32. Named Entity Recognition: Identifying and classifying important words in a text, like names and places.
  33. Sentiment Analysis: Determining whether a text expresses positive or negative emotions.
  34. Text Classification: Categorizing a text into different groups, like news or sports.
  35. Text Generation: Creating new text based on a given prompt or context.
  36. Language Translation: Converting text from one language to another.
  37. Text-to-Speech: Converting written text into spoken words.
  38. Speech-to-Text: Converting spoken words into written text.
  39. Image Captioning: Describing an image with words.
  40. Text-to-Image Generation: Creating an image based on a written description.
  41. Knowledge Distillation: Transferring knowledge from a large language model to a smaller one.
  42. Quantization: Reducing the size of a language model without losing accuracy.
  43. Pruning: Removing unnecessary parts of a language model to make it smaller.
  44. Federated Learning: Training a language model on data from different devices without sharing the data.
  45. Differential Privacy: Protecting the privacy of individuals whose data is used to train a language model.
  46. Adversarial Training: Making a language model more robust by training it on examples that are designed to fool it.
  47. Transfer Learning: Using knowledge learned from one task to improve performance on a related task.
  48. Multitask Learning: Training a language model to perform multiple tasks at the same time.
  49. Continual Learning: Allowing a language model to learn new tasks without forgetting old ones.
  50. Few-shot Adaptation: Adapting a language model to a new task with only a few examples.
  51. Meta-learning: Teaching a language model how to learn new tasks quickly.
  52. Reinforcement Learning: Training a language model by rewarding it for good behavior.
  53. Unsupervised Learning: Training a language model on data that is not labeled.
  54. Semi-supervised Learning: Training a language model on a mix of labeled and unlabeled data.
  55. Self-supervised Learning: Training a language model on data that is automatically labeled.
  56. Contrastive Learning: Training a language model to distinguish between similar and different examples.
  57. Generative Adversarial Networks: Two language models that compete to create realistic data.
  58. Variational Autoencoders: A language model that can generate new data from a learned distribution.
  59. Autoregressive Models: Language models that predict the next word in a sequence based on the previous words.
  60. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers: A language model that can understand the context of words in a sentence.
  61. Robustness: How well a language model performs under different conditions.
  62. Interpretability: How easy it is to understand why a language model makes certain predictions.
  63. Explainability: How well a language model can explain its predictions to humans.
  64. Model Compression: Reducing the size and computational requirements of a language model.
  65. Knowledge Graphs: Structured databases of real-world knowledge.
  66. Entity Linking: Connecting words in a text to entries in a knowledge graph.
  67. Commonsense Reasoning: The ability of a language model to make logical inferences based on general knowledge.
  68. Multimodal Learning: Training a language model on multiple types of data, like text, images, and audio.
  69. Cross-lingual Transfer: Transferring knowledge learned in one language to another language.
  70. Domain Adaptation: Adapting a language model to perform well on a different but related domain.
  71. Active Learning: Selecting the most informative examples to train a language model.
  72. Curriculum Learning: Gradually exposing a language model to more complex examples during training.
  73. Lifelong Learning: Allowing a language model to continuously learn and adapt over its lifetime.
  74. Few-shot Generation: Generating new examples based on a small number of provided examples.
  75. Data Augmentation: Increasing the size and diversity of a training dataset by applying transformations or generating synthetic examples.
  76. Noisy Channel Modeling: Modeling the generation process as a noisy channel and aiming to recover the original input.
  77. Masked Language Modeling: Predicting masked words in a sequence.
  78. Next Sentence Prediction: Predicting whether two sentences follow each other in a coherent way.
  79. Sequence-to-Sequence Models: Mapping an input sequence to an output sequence.
  80. Attention Mechanisms: Allowing the language model to focus on relevant parts of the input.
  81. Transformer-XL: A Transformer architecture that can learn dependencies beyond a fixed-length context.
  82. XLNet: A language model that combines autoregressive and bidirectional training.
  83. T5: A language model that frames all tasks as text-to-text problems.
  84. GPT-3: A large-scale language model with 175 billion parameters.
  85. Few-shot Prompting: Providing a small number of examples or demonstrations in the prompt.
  86. In-context Learning: Learning from examples provided within the input context.
  87. Prompt Tuning: Optimizing continuous prompt embeddings.
  88. Prefix-tuning: Prepending a small number of trainable parameters to the input sequence.
  89. Adapter-based Tuning: Inserting small trainable modules between layers of a pre-trained model.
  90. Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning: Fine-tuning a small number of parameters.
  91. Low-rank Adaptation: Learning low-rank updates to the model parameters.
  92. Sparse Fine-tuning: Fine-tuning a sparse subset of the model parameters.
  93. Multilingual Models: Models that can handle tasks in different languages.
  94. Code Generation: Generating programming code based on natural language descriptions.
  95. Dialogue Systems: Models that engage in conversational interactions.
  96. Fact Checking: Verifying the accuracy of claims or statements.
  97. Text Style Transfer: Rewriting text in a different style.
  98. Zero-shot Task Generalization: Performing tasks without explicit training.