Schedule and Past Meetings
Meetings are held every Wednesday in CoDa E201 at 4pm. Please sign up to be a discussant here! Goal(s) of the discussant group is to:
- Do a single “deep dive” per week about one subject (can be multiple papers)
- We have suggested several papers for each week, more than one can cover thoroughly in a week. Pick a small, focused set of papers and read them thoroughly
- Prepare a 20-30 minute presentation, accessible to a second year PhD student, focusing on (a) seeding discussion and (b) identifying gaps and connections, and (c) formulating open problems
Signing up is a great way to (1) force yourself to engage with the content of the paper (2) get to know your co-discussant(s) and (3) ensure the success of the reading group!
Upcoming Sessions
| Date | Topic | Resources |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-10-16 | Introduction | Slides |
| 2024-10-23 | Scaling Laws 1 (Training Compute-Optimal Language Models) | Paper Slides |
| 2024-10-30 | Scaling Laws 2 (Explaining Neural Scaling Laws) | Paper Slides |
| 2024-11-06 | Data Selection 1 (Perplexity Correlations, Scaling Laws + Data Filtering) | Paper 1 Paper 2 Slides |
| 2024-11-13 | Data Selection 2 (DsDm, LESS) | Paper 1 Paper 2 Tutorial Slides (DsDm) Slides (LESS) |
| 2024-11-20 | Data Selection 3 (Statistical Theory) | Paper Slides |
| 2024-11-20 | Data Selection 3 (Pruning, Prediction) | Paper 1 Paper 2 |
| 2025-01-22 | Post-training 1 (RLHF, AlpacaFarm) | Paper 1 Paper 2 Slides |
| 2025-01-29 | No meeting (ICML Deadline) | |
| 2025-02-05 | Post-training 2 (Direct methods & Offline RL) | Paper 1 Paper 2 Paper 3 Paper 4 Slides 1 Slides 2 |
| 2025-02-12 | Post-training 3 (DeepSeek) | Paper Slides |
| 2025-02-19 | Post-training 4 (Synthetic Data) | Slides |
| 2025-02-26 | Post-training 4 (Synthetic Data & Self-Improvement) | Paper 1 Paper 2 Slides |
| 2025-03-04 | Post-training 5 (Simplicity) | Paper 1 Paper 2 Slides |
| 2025-03-11 | Post-training 5 (In-Context Learning) | Slides |
| (Between-quarter break) | ||
| 2025-04-09 | Reasoning 1 (Introduction) | Slides |
| 2025-04-16 | Reasoning 2 (STaR) | Slides Paper |