Summer School on Large Language Models

Objective and Scope The summer school will offer a series of workshops, lectures, and hands-on sessions, aiming to bridge the knowledge gap among members of academia and industry in the fast-developing research area of foundational large language models (LLMs). The curriculum will cover a range of both core and specialized topics in LLMs.

• Transformer architectures
• Pretraining
• Model alignment, parameter-efficient tuning
• In-context learning and reasoning
• Responsible AI and LLM safety
• Model editing

Format The school agenda will consist of lectures, followed by more hands-on practice sessions where students will do different exercises and mini-projects.

Expected Outcomes The participants are expected to gain an understanding of the research topics, run relevant baseline models, and conduct supervised research. We also envision that some of the participants will engage in collaborative research projects beyond the summer school.

Venue The workshop will take place at the Small Auditorium, Main Building, American University of Armenia (40 M. Baghramyan Avenue, Yerevan).

Target Audience The school is designed for senior undergraduate and graduate students in Armenia, Diaspora and abroad, pre-doctoral students, as weel as researchers both from academia and industry.

The school will be open to a limited number of qualified and motivated candidates. Students (Bachelor, Masters, Ph.D.), researchers (both academic and industrial), and academic/industrial professionals are encouraged to apply.
At the end of the application period, all applicants will be informed whether or not their summer school application is accepted.

Applications to attend the summer school should be received before May 3, 2024.
Applicants will receive notification of acceptance by May 31, 2024. Accepted applicants will then be invited to pay the registration fee to finalize their registration to the summer school.

Please submit your application by filling out the Application Form.
Once we receive your application, we will send you a test assessing your Python programming skills. This test is mandatory, and all selected participants should have satisfactory results.
Note that submitting an application does not guarantee that you will be able to attend -- you must wait to receive a notification of acceptance before you can do so.

The registration fee is 300 USD or 120,000 AMD.
The fee will cover access to GPUs during the course of the summer school, which you will need to do the projects.

All applicants are eligible for financial assistance. Students enrolled at Armenian universities automatically qualify for a reduced fee of 10,000 AMD.
If you would like to be considered for registration fee reduction, please fill out the Financial Assistance Form.

• Application deadline: May 3, 2024
• Notification of acceptance: May 31, 2024
• Summer School dates: July 1 - 7, 2024

Coming soon.