Generative AI

10-423 + 10-623 + 10-723, Fall 2025
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, 25-Aug Lecture 1 : RNN LMs / Autodiff
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Wed, 27-Aug Lecture 2 : Transformer LMs
[Slides]

HW0 out

Fri, 29-Aug Recitation: HW0
[Handout]

Mon, 1-Sep (Labor Day - No Class)

Wed, 3-Sep Lecture 3 : Learning LLMs / Decoding
[Slides]

Fri, 5-Sep (No Recitation)

Mon, 8-Sep Lecture 4 : Pre-training, fine-tuning / Modern Transformers
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

HW0 due

HW1 out (L1-L4)

Generative models of images

Wed, 10-Sep Lecture 5 : Computer Vision: CNNs / Encoder-only Transformers / Vision Transformers
[Slides]

Quiz 1 (in-class, L1-L4)

Fri, 12-Sep Recitation: HW1
[Handout]

Mon, 15-Sep Lecture 6 : Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) / PGM
[Slides]

Wed, 17-Sep Lecture 7 : Diffusion models (Part I)
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Fri, 19-Sep (No Recitation)

Mon, 22-Sep Lecture 8 : Diffusion models (Part II)
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

HW1 due

HW2 out (L5-L8)

Applying and adapting foundation models

Wed, 24-Sep Lecture 9 : Variational Autoencoders (VAEs)
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Fri, 26-Sep Recitation: HW2
[Slides]

Mon, 29-Sep Lecture 10 : Parameter-efficient fine tuning
[Slides]

Quiz 2 (in-class, L5-L9)

Wed, 1-Oct Lecture 11 : In-Context Learning / Prompt Engineering / Instruction Fine-tuning / Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF)
[Slides]

Project description out

Fri, 3-Oct Recitation: HW3
[Handout]

Sat, 4-Oct

HW2 due

HW3 out (L9-L12)

Sun, 5-Oct

Multimodal foundation models

Mon, 6-Oct Lecture 12 : Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) / Text-to-image generation / Latent diffusion model
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Wed, 8-Oct Lecture 13 : Vision-language models
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

(Quiz 3 in-class, L9-L12)

Fri, 10-Oct (No Recitation)

For future semesters: Project Team Formation form released

Mon, 13-Oct Fall break

Tue, 14-Oct

Wed, 15-Oct Fall break

Thu, 16-Oct

Fri, 17-Oct Fall break

Mon, 20-Oct Lecture 14 : Latent diffusion model / Diffusion Transformer / Prompt-to-Prompt
[Slides] [Slides (Inked)]

Scaling Up

Wed, 22-Oct Lecture 15 : Querying Transformer / Scaling Laws
[Slides]

Thu, 23-Oct

HW3 due

HW4 out (L12-L14)

Fri, 24-Oct Recitation: HW4

Project team formation due by 2pm

Mon, 27-Oct Lecture 16 : Mixture of Experts

(Quiz 4 in-class, L12-L15)

Wed, 29-Oct Lecture 17 : Distributed training

Fri, 31-Oct (No Recitation)

Mon, 3-Nov Lecture 18 : Flash Attention / Efficient decoding strategies

HW4 due

HW623 out; Practice problems out

Tue, 4-Nov

Advanced Topics

Wed, 5-Nov Lecture 19 : Long Context in LLM

Fri, 7-Nov (No Recitation)

Mon, 10-Nov Lecture 20 : Reasoning Models

Mon, 10-Nov Exam (evening exam, details will be announced on Piazza Starting at 7pm Ending at 9pm)

Wed, 12-Nov Lecture 21 : Real-world Issues and Considerations / What can go wrong?

Thu, 13-Nov

Fri, 14-Nov (No Recitation)

Project proposal due

Sat, 15-Nov

Mon, 17-Nov Lecture 22 : State Space Models

(Quiz 5 in-class, L16-L20)

Tue, 18-Nov

Wed, 19-Nov Lecture 23 : Code Generation / Autonomous Agents

Fri, 21-Nov (No Recitation)

Mon, 24-Nov Lecture 24 : Audio understanding and synthesis

Project midway report due

Wed, 26-Nov Thanksgiving Break - No Class

Thu, 27-Nov Thanksgiving Break - No Class

Fri, 28-Nov Thanksgiving Break - No Class

Mon, 1-Dec Lecture 25 : Generative Models for Videos

HW623 due; (Quiz 6 in-class, L21-L24 for 10-723 only)

Wed, 3-Dec Lecture 26 : Topic TBD

Fri, 5-Dec (No Recitation)

Sun, 7-Dec

Project poster due

Tue, 9-Dec Project Final Presentations 8:30am - 11:30am GHC 6121 + GHC 6115

Thu, 11-Dec

Project final report due