CS 394E Contemporary Topics in LLMs

CS 394E · Fall 2026/2027

Schedule

15 weeks, Mondays at 14:30 – 17:30. At most two readings per week; each summary is due 12:30 Saudi time on the day of class.

Topics follow the syllabus. Readings, presenters and slides are added as the term progresses — check back the week before each class.

Week1 LLM and Agents Foundations

Course Overview and Introduction to LLMs

One-off: this week meets twice, Monday and Thursday, 14:30–16:00. From week 2 the course meets Mondays only, 14:30–17:30.

  1. Introduction & Course Overview

    Slides

  2. N-gram Language Models

    Optional N-gram Language Models Daniel Jurafsky & James H. Martin Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft (Aug 2026), ch. 3 PDF Textbook chapter, posted freely by the authors.

4 topics
  • Course Overview
  • What are Language Models
  • A Brief History: From N-grams to Transformers to Agentic AI
  • Common NLP Tasks and LLM applications
Week2 LLM and Agents Foundations

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week3 LLM and Agents Foundations

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week4 LLM and Agents Foundations

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week5 Reliability and Evaluation

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week6 Reliability and Evaluation

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week7 Scalable LLM Systems

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week8 Scalable LLM Systems

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week9 Scalable LLM Systems

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week10 Domain Applications

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week11 Domain Applications

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week12 Domain Applications

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week13 Domain Applications

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week14 Domain Applications

To be announced

  1. Reading to be announced

Week15

Project Presentations

  1. Project presentations

1 topic
  • Final project presentations and discussion