Home›Concepts
Concepts
Concepts
How AI works, in plain language: from the artificial neuron to the Transformer, pre-training and reasoning models.
Total 54 · Clear filters
OverfittingOverfitting is when a model fits its training data so closely that it performs poorly on new data. It is one half of the bias–variance trade-off and is usually spotted by comparing training and validation performance.RegularizationRegularization is the practice of making a problem's answer simpler, usually by adding a penalty term to the objective, so that ill-posed problems become solvable and models avoid overfitting.Decision tree learningDecision tree learning builds a classification or regression tree from data by repeatedly splitting it into more homogeneous groups. It is a widely used supervised method whose rules can be read directly, and whose main weaknesses are instability and a tendency to overfit.Feature engineeringFeature engineering is the preprocessing step that turns raw data into more useful inputs for machine learning and statistical models, shaping, cleaning and trimming the attributes a model learns from.Activation functionA function applied to each node's weighted sum, giving neural networks their non-linearity. Sigmoid, tanh and ReLU shaped early deep learning; GELU now dominates transformers.AutoencoderAn autoencoder is an unsupervised neural network that compresses its input into a low-dimensional code and reconstructs it back, learning a latent representation useful for dimensionality reduction, denoising and anomaly detection.Context windowA context window is the full span of text a model can refer to while producing a response, measured in tokens and including the response itself. Its size, and how evenly a model uses it, shape what the model can do.Long contextLong context is a model's capacity to take in and work over very large inputs — documents, images, recordings — in a single request. Systems now reach millions of tokens, though finding information inside that window is a separate skill.QuantizationQuantization stores a language model's weights and activations at lower numerical precision, cutting the memory and bandwidth that inference requires. Methods such as LLM.int8() and GPTQ made very large models runnable on far smaller hardware.KV cacheA KV cache keeps the key and value vectors a model has already computed for earlier tokens, so each new token reuses them instead of recomputing. Its memory footprint is what makes high-throughput serving hard to scale.Multimodal modelsA multimodal model handles more than one kind of input or output, such as images together with text, inside a single model. Work on CLIP and Flamingo showed how such models are trained and how they can be steered toward new tasks.Embodied AIEmbodied AI is the study of agents that learn by interacting with an environment, using egocentric perception, rather than only from datasets curated from the internet. Simulators serve as virtual testbeds where such agents are trained and evaluated.Mechanistic interpretabilityMechanistic interpretability explains model behaviour by finding the internal computations and features that produce it. Work on superposition and sparse autoencoders shows how many features can be packed into few neurons.Reward hackingReward hacking is what happens when a system optimises a proxy reward that only imperfectly captures what we want: it scores well on the proxy while performing badly on the true objective.