Course on Generative AI
Saarland University — Winter Semester 2024/25

Course overview

This 6-credit course will provide an introduction to generative AI, focusing on recent advances, challenges, and applications. The course will be structured into three modules, each offering lectures and hands-on experience as follows:
  • The first module will cover the fundamentals of foundation models, prompting strategies, pre-training, and fine-tuning methods.
  • The second module will cover the trustworthiness aspects of generative AI, including poisoning attacks, red teaming, and watermarking.
  • The third module will provide an overview of generative AI applications, in particular, focusing on educational technology and assistive agents for programming.
There are no formal pre-requisites for taking the course. To get started, please register for the course.

News

  • 31 October 2024: We have created a new discussion forum: https://course-genai-w24.discourse.group/
  • 24 October 2024: We have added examination dates below. We have also updated the plan for the course's weekly content.
  • 23 October 2024: Students who didn't submit the Week 1 assignment need to confirm if they want to continue with the enrollment in the course. We have already sent an email to those students, and the deadline for confirmation is 27 October 2024. Since we have to provision computing resources and submission infrastructure for enrolled students, it is important for us to know which students are continuing the course.
  • 11 October 2024: We have sent a confirmation email to all the students who filled in the registration form by the 10 October deadline. However, we could not get in touch with some students because of the wrong email addresses provided during registration. If you haven't received the confirmation email, you should contact us as soon as possible to finalize your registration.
  • 10 October 2024: The first introductory lecture will take place on 15 October. This lecture will primarily focus on logistics and organizational details, and will be of shorter duration.
  • 10 October 2024: We have a new joint address genai-w24-tutors@mpi-sws.org to reach out to organizers.
  • Until 10 October 2024: We request you to register for the course using the following Google form. We will use this information to create mailing lists and personal submission links for students. The course content will be available for download to registered students. (Note: the form link has now been removed after the deadline)

Course structure

The course will involve weekly lectures on Tuesdays. There will be weekly assignments comprising reading material, exercises, and implementation. In addition, we will schedule designated office hours where students can clarify any doubts about the course. Toward the end of the course, there will be a course project spanning four weeks. The weekly schedule, starting 15th October, will be as follows: The examination dates are as follows:
  • Exam: 20 Feb 2025 (Thursday) at 10am–1pm.
  • Re-exam: 19 Mar 2025 (Wednesday) at 10am–1pm.

Weekly content

The weekly content for the course is planned as follows:
  • [15 Oct] Week 1: Introduction
  • [22 Oct] Week 2: Background on Language Models and Transformers
  • [29 Oct] Week 3: Large Language Models and In-context Learning
  • [05 Nov] Week 4: Pre-training and Supervised Fine-tuning
  • [12 Nov] Week 5: Preference-based Fine-tuning for Alignment
  • [19 Nov] No lectures or office hours (time to work on assignments)
  • [26 Nov] Week 6: Multi-modal Foundation Models
  • [03 Dec] Week 7: Trustworthiness Aspects I
  • [10 Dec] Week 8: Trustworthiness Aspects II
  • [17 Dec] No lectures or office hours (time to work on assignments)
  • [24 Dec] No lectures or office hours (winter holidays)
  • [31 Dec] No lectures or office hours (winter holidays)
  • [07 Jan] Week 9: GenAI-powered Programming Education I
  • [14 Jan] Week 10: GenAI-powered Programming Education II
  • [21 Jan] No lectures or office hours (time to work on project)
  • [28 Jan] Week 11: Project Discussion
  • [04 Feb] Week 12: Examination Preparation

Organizers

To reach out to organizers, you can send an email to our joint address genai-w24-tutors@mpi-sws.org. Please make sure that your emails are sent to this joint address as a receiver instead of individual organizers (emails sent to individuals will likely result in delayed or no response).





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