Generative AI

10-423 + 10-623 + 10-723, Spring 2026
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University




Important Notes

This schedule is tentative and subject to change. Please check back often.

You can access the OneNote notebook containing all whiteboards from lecture/recitation here. The PDF version of each whiteboard is linked below.

Tentative Schedule

Date Lecture Readings Announcements

Generative models of text

Mon, 12-Jan Lecture 1 : RNN LMs / Autodiff
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Wed, 14-Jan Lecture 2 : Transformer LMs
[Slides]

HW0 out

Fri, 16-Jan Recitation: HW0
[Handout]

Mon, 19-Jan (MLK Day - No Class)

Wed, 21-Jan Lecture 3 : Learning LLMs / Decoding
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Fri, 23-Jan (No Recitation)

Mon, 26-Jan Lecture 4 : Pre-training, fine-tuning / Modern Transformers
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

HW0 Slot A due

HW1 out (L1-L4)

Generative models of images

Wed, 28-Jan Lecture 5 : Computer Vision: CNNs / Encoder-only Transformers / Vision Transformers
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Quiz 1 (in-class, L1-L4)

Thu, 29-Jan

HW0 Feedback (tentative)

Fri, 30-Jan Recitation: HW1
[Handout] [Supplemental Material]

Sun, 1-Feb

HW0 Slot B due (tentative)

Mon, 2-Feb Lecture 6 : Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) / PGM
[Slides]

Wed, 4-Feb Lecture 7 : Diffusion models (Part I)
[Slides]

Fri, 6-Feb (No Recitation)

Mon, 9-Feb Lecture 8 : Diffusion models (Part II)
[Slides]

HW1 Slot A due

HW2 out (L5-L8)

Applying and adapting foundation models

Wed, 11-Feb Lecture 9 : Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Fri, 13-Feb Recitation: HW2
[Handout]

Sat, 14-Feb

HW1 Feedback (tentative)

Mon, 16-Feb Lecture 10 : Parameter-efficient fine tuning
[Slides]

Quiz 2 (in-class, L5-L9)

Tue, 17-Feb

HW1 Slot B due (tentative)

Wed, 18-Feb Lecture 11 : In-Context Learning / Prompt Engineering / Instruction Fine-tuning / Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF)
[Slides]

Project description out

Fri, 20-Feb Recitation: HW3
[Handout]

Sat, 21-Feb

HW2 Slot A due

HW3 out (L9-L12)

Multimodal foundation models

Mon, 23-Feb Lecture 12 : Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) / Text-to-image generation / Latent diffusion model
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Wed, 25-Feb Programming Test HW1/HW2

(Quiz 3 in-class, L9-L12)

Thu, 26-Feb

HW2 Feedback (tentative)

Fri, 27-Feb Lecture 13 : Vision-language models
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Project Team Formation form released

Sun, 1-Mar

HW2 Slot B due (tentative)

Mon, 2-Mar Spring Break

Tue, 3-Mar

Wed, 4-Mar Spring Break

Thu, 5-Mar

Fri, 6-Mar Spring Break

Mon, 9-Mar Lecture 14 : Cross-Attention / Diffusion Transformer / Prompt-to-Prompt
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Scaling Up

Wed, 11-Mar Lecture 15 : Querying Transformer / Scaling Laws
[Slides]

Thu, 12-Mar

HW3 Slot A due

HW4 out (L12-L14)

Fri, 13-Mar Recitation: HW4
[Handout]

Project team formation due by 2pm

Mon, 16-Mar Lecture 16 : Mixture of Experts
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

(Quiz 4 in-class, L12-L15)

Tue, 17-Mar

HW3 Feedback (tentative)

Wed, 18-Mar Lecture 17 : Distributed training
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Fri, 20-Mar (No Recitation)

HW3 Slot B due (tentative)

Mon, 23-Mar Lecture 18 : Flash Attention / Efficient decoding strategies
[Slides]

HW4 Slot A due

HW623 out; Practice problems out

Advanced Topics

Wed, 25-Mar Lecture 19 : Long Context in LLM
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Fri, 27-Mar Programing Test HW3/HW4

Sat, 28-Mar

HW4 Feedback (tentative)

Mon, 30-Mar Lecture 20 : Reasoning Models
[Slides]

Mon, 30-Mar Exam (evening exam, details will be announced on Piazza)

HW4 Slot B due (tentative)

Wed, 1-Apr Lecture 21 : State Space Models / Hybrid Models
[Slides]

Fri, 3-Apr (No Recitation)

Project proposal due

Mon, 6-Apr Lecture 22 : Real-world Issues and Considerations / What can go wrong?
[Slides]

(Quiz 5 in-class, L16-L20)

Wed, 8-Apr Lecture 23 : Code Generation / Autonomous Agents
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Thu, 9-Apr Spring Carnival

Fri, 10-Apr Spring Carnival

Mon, 13-Apr Lecture 24 : Audio understanding and synthesis
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Project midway report due

Wed, 15-Apr Lecture 25 : Generative Models for Videos
[Slides]

Fri, 17-Apr (No Recitation)

Mon, 20-Apr Lecture 26 : Interactive World Models + Science of Alignment
[Slides] [Slides]

HW623 due; (Quiz 6 in-class, L21-L24)

Wed, 22-Apr (No lecture)

Fri, 24-Apr (No Recitation)

Sun, 26-Apr

Project poster due

Tue, 28-Apr Project Final Presentations 5:30pm - 8:30pm GHC 6121 + GHC 6115

Thu, 30-Apr

Project final report due