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Language AI

Typical Sampling

Typical sampling is a text-generation method that picks the next word from tokens whose information content sits close to the model's expected surprise…

2 min readRead
Language AI

Mirostat Perplexity Control

Mirostat is a decoding algorithm that actively steers a language model's output toward a target perplexity (a set level of surprise) using a feedback loop.

2 min readRead
Language AI

Sycophancy in Language Models

Sycophancy is the tendency of AI language models to tell users what they want to hear, agreeing with stated opinions or caving to pushback even…

2 min readRead
Technical

Second-Order Optimization and Newton Methods

Second-order optimization uses curvature information (the Hessian matrix of second derivatives) to take smarter steps toward a minimum, not just the slope.

2 min readRead
Fundamentals

Weight Decay and L2 Regularization

Weight decay is a simple, powerful technique that nudges a model's weights toward zero during training, discouraging it from relying too heavily on any…

2 min readRead
Fundamentals

Dropout and Stochastic Regularization

Dropout is a regularization trick that randomly switches off a fraction of neurons during each training step, forcing the network to build redundant, robust…

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Technical

RMSNorm and Pre-Layer Normalization

RMSNorm is a lightweight normalization layer that rescales activations by their root mean square, and pre-layer normalization places that step before each…

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Technical

SwiGLU and Gated Activations

SwiGLU is a gated activation function that multiplies one linear projection of the input by a Swish-activated second projection, acting as a learnable…

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Technical

Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks

Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks let a convolutional network learn how much to weight each feature channel, recalibrating them based on global context.

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Technical

Warmup and Cosine Annealing Schedules

Warmup gently ramps the learning rate up from near zero before training, then cosine annealing smoothly decays it back down following a cosine curve.

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Technical

Cyclical Learning Rates

Cyclical learning rates repeatedly cycle the learning rate up and down between a lower and upper bound instead of only decaying it.

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Technical

Sharpness-Aware Minimization

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is an optimization method that seeks not just a low loss but a low loss across a whole neighborhood of weights — a flat…

2 min readRead

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