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Week 5: Phase II Capstone + LLM Training Begins

Days 29–35 · 17.5 hours

This week closes Phase II with a comprehensive capstone project, then launches Phase III with the modern LLM training pipeline.

Daily Lessons

Day Topic Phase Focus
29 Phase II Capstone Day 1 II Train mini-LM
30 Phase II Capstone Day 2 II Ablation report + checkpoint
31 The Modern LLM Recipe III Pretrain → SFT → Alignment
32 Supervised Fine-Tuning III Instruction-following
33 RLHF III Reward models + PPO
34 DPO & Modern Alignment III Direct preference optimization
35 LoRA & Efficient Fine-Tuning III Parameter-efficient methods

Key Concepts

  • Phase II capstone: train a ~10M param GPT from scratch, run ablation report, analyze scaling
  • Phase II checkpoint: verify mastery of attention, transformers, scaling, tokenization, and architecture comparisons
  • The 3-stage LLM pipeline: pretrain → supervised fine-tuning → alignment (RLHF/DPO)
  • Parameter-efficient fine-tuning: LoRA, QLoRA, adapters — update <1% of params for 95% of quality

Study Notes References