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Обложка курса «Modern LLMs» на Stepik
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Engineering course on modern LLMs—from tokenization, RoPE, attention, MoE, and Transformer alternatives to pretraining, KV caches, quantization, SFT, RLHF/DPO/GRPO, reasoning, RAG, agents, and evaluation. Beyond open lectures, the paid Stepik course has 500+ learning activities in total: auto-graded tests, exercises with solutions, and self-check questions with answers; tested notebooks; and a custom MiniLLM—dense S/M/L and their MoE twins—from data to ablations. Part of an evolving series on ML and LLMs.

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Уроки в курсе «Modern LLMs»Количество уроков 368
Тесты в курсе «Modern LLMs»Количество квизов 299
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Разделы в курсе «Modern LLMs» 19 разделов Уроки в курсе «Modern LLMs» 368 уроков Тесты в курсе «Modern LLMs» 299 тестов Последнее обновление курса «Modern LLMs» обн. 9 августа 2026

The Modern LLM Landscape

23 урока
1. Why an engineer needs a map of the landscape
2. How the course reads code, and why a few systems recur
3. Nine years in fifteen minutes: 2017 → 2026
4. A bridge to the classics: taxonomy instead of a zoo
5. Two passports: the model and the system around it
6. Axis I up close: dense and MoE
7. Worked comparison: gpt-oss-120b and Llama 4 Scout
8. Axis II: context means length, quality, and cost
9. Axis III: modalities are directional
10. Axis IV: who controls the reasoning budget?
11. Axis V: access, licensing, and practical openness
12. Axis VI: the price of a token is not the price of a system
13. Dated reference: closed and API families
14. Dated reference: open weights and reproducible artefacts
15. From public signal to engineering evidence
16. openai/gpt-oss as the course’s table of contents
17. Code, level 1: a passport from a validated config.json
18. Level 2: what the notebook adds
19. The course map and the growing series
20. Self-check questions
21. Exercises with solutions
22. Summary cheat sheet
23. Notebook and sources

Tokenization and Embeddings

17 уроков
1. Tokenization is an architectural decision
2. From word vocabularies to byte-level subwords
3. Compression is the right analogy—with limits
4. The tokenizer as a deterministic program
5. Worked example: from UTF-8 to a compression curve
6. Level-1 code: a transparent BBPE trainer
7. What the notebook adds
8. Reading o200k_harmony correctly
9. A documented vocabulary landscape
10. Fertility, language, and domain
11. Embedding cost and weight tying
12. Where the token analogy extends to other modalities
13. Connections to the rest of the course
14. Self-check questions
15. Exercises
16. Key takeaways
17. Notebook and sources

Positional Representations: From Sinusoids to Multidimensional…

18 уроков
1. Motivation: content attention is not an ordering mechanism
2. The historical arc: one problem, several architectural answers
3. Fourier intuition, complex rotations, and what is exact
4. Formalism: the frequency ladder and the rotary identity
5. Worked example: three placements, one relative displacement
6. Reading the RoPE spectrum without inventing a hard horizon
7. Context extension changes a spectrum, not just one number
8. ALiBi: a distance prior in the logits
9. NoPE and hybrid position mechanisms
10. Reading gpt-oss positional fields as evidence—not biography
11. Level-one code: explicit shapes and explicit scaling placement
12. What the notebook validates
13. M-RoPE and time-aligned multimodal position
14. The 2026 landscape is a branching architecture map
15. Self-check questions
16. Exercises with solutions
17. Key takeaways
18. Notebook and primary sources

Modern Attention Mechanisms

20 уроков
1. Motivation: two bills hidden behind one decode step
2. The historical split: compress the cache or reorganize the…
3. Three useful classical views—and where they stop
4. SDPA, masks, and the square-root scale
5. Worked storage arithmetic: four head layouts and one hybrid…
6. GQA is a grouping invariant, not a quality guarantee
7. MLA stores a joint latent and absorbs linear maps
8. FlashAttention: dense attention without the quadratic HBM object
9. Windowed attention and layer schedules
10. “Attention sink” refers to two different objects
11. Sparse attention selects positions rather than shrinking each…
12. Level-one code: transparent SDPA, masks, and GQA
13. What the notebook verifies
14. Reading the gpt-oss attention implementation
15. A contemporary attention landscape with evidence labels
16. Multimodal attention: where the visual state is paid for
17. Self-check questions
18. Exercises
19. Key takeaways
20. Notebook and primary sources

Normalization, activations, and the anatomy of a Transformer…

21 урок
1. Why the quiet fields in a configuration matter
2. The historical problem was not “which norm wins?”
3. Three useful classical analogies
4. The residual stream and what the identity path actually…
5. LayerNorm and RMSNorm side by side
6. Four norm placements, four computation graphs
7. Query/key stabilization is a family, not one universal recipe
8. From a two-matrix FFN to gated multiplication
9. SwiGLU budgets and the gpt-oss variant
10. Reconstructing Llama-3.1-8B exactly
11. DyT and DyISRU: removing the feature reduction
12. mHC constrains residual mixing, not hidden-state trajectories
13. Level-1 code: the pieces we can inspect directly
14. What the notebook adds
15. Reading gpt-oss from code rather than from a guessed config…
16. A current block table with an evidence column
17. The same accounting applies to vision blocks
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises with solutions
20. Key takeaways
21. Notebook and primary sources

Mixture of Experts

20 уроков
1. The bargain: capacity without activating the whole bank
2. From local specialists to trillion-parameter sparse models
3. Three older ideas hiding inside modern MoE
4. A typed contract for routing and parameter accounting
5. Rebuilding both gpt-oss models from open code
6. A numerical router trace
7. Load balancing without conflating three mechanisms
8. Fine-grained experts and always-on shared capacity
9. What expert specialization evidence can actually support
10. Inference: the expert bank, all-to-all, and batch union
11. LatentMoE and alternatives to fixed discrete top-k
12. Level-one code: policies should be visible
13. What the notebook verifies
14. Reading the gpt-oss implementation
15. A source-aware snapshot of current MoE architectures
16. Multimodal MoE is not one architecture
17. Self-check questions
18. Exercises
19. Key takeaways
20. Notebook and primary sources

Beyond the Transformer: SSMs, Mamba, and Hybrid Sequence Models

21 урок
1. Two costs of a long context
2. From control theory to hybrid language models
3. Three readings of the same recurrence
4. Discretization with Zero-Order Hold
5. Worked example: the cost of replacing exact ZOH by $\Delta B$
6. What selectivity changes in Mamba
7. Mamba-2 and the scope of State Space Duality
8. Delta-rule memory and adaptive forgetting
9. What a fixed state can and cannot preserve
10. Memory accounting and core-only arithmetic
11. Three hybrid patterns
12. Level-1 code: exact discretization, delta update, and scan…
13. What the notebook verifies
14. Reading the open Mamba implementation
15. A current architecture passport
16. Audio, video, and other long streams
17. Self-check questions
18. Exercises
19. Key takeaways
20. Notebook and primary sources
21. Supplementary module 7b: Diffusion LLMs (dLLM)

Pretraining: Data, Scaling Laws, and Optimizers

20 уроков
1. Motivation: three irreversible choices
2. The historical arc: the objective kept expanding
3. Three classical ideas hiding inside frontier pretraining
4. Formalism: compute, a fitted loss surface, and its analytic…
5. From raw web pages to a training distribution
6. Worked example A: two budgets and the cost of a mnemonic
7. The isoFLOP valley and the fitted cost of long training
8. Inference-aware allocation: when does the smaller model repay…
9. The data wall: token counts stop being interchangeable
10. Muon: change the spectrum of a matrix update
11. MuonClip: correct the parameter source of unstable attention…
12. Code (level 1): small functions that expose their assumptions
13. Level 2: how to use the module notebook
14. µP and MetaP: make small-model tuning informative
15. Parallelism: fitting the training state before optimizing…
16. Four directions in contemporary pretraining
17. Run passports: how to read public evidence
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, notebook, and sources

KV Caches and Efficient Inference

20 уроков
1. Motivation: a generated token is a memory transaction
2. The historical arc: four successive bottlenecks
3. A bridge to classical systems: pages, caches, and queues
4. Formalism and worked example A: how many bytes does one token…
5. One request, two computational regimes
6. Worked example B: the bandwidth ceiling and the KV term
7. Batch economics: where weight amortization stops being the…
8. PagedAttention: decouple logical length from physical placement
9. Prefix caching: do not rebuild an identical beginning
10. Tiered placement: when HBM is only the first level
11. Prefill/decode disaggregation: give each phase its own pool
12. Code (level 1): geometry, bandwidth, and pages
13. Level 2: what the notebook makes reproducible
14. Compression I: eviction changes which history exists
15. Compression II: quantization, low rank, and the order of…
16. Engines and cache contracts: a dated map, not a permanent…
17. Reading a model’s inference passport
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, notebook, and sources

Speculative Decoding and Quantization

20 уроков
1. Two different ways to make a token cheaper
2. From exact sampling to deployable systems
3. The older ideas underneath the modern stack
4. The exact propose–verify–correct cycle
5. Worked example A: seeing the balance component by component
6. Expected progress per cycle
7. A cost model, an optimum, and an illustrative MTP point
8. A taxonomy of proposers
9. Native multi-token prediction at inference time
10. Verification as a short, wider decode operation
11. What low-bit quantization actually changes
12. Microscaled FP4, W4A4, and the role of hardware
13. Code: make the probability contract explicit
14. The notebook as an executable contract
15. Combining the levers without multiplying away the bottlenecks
16. A deployment workflow for current engines
17. Reading a quant/spec run passport
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. What to retain, notebook, and sources

Supervised Fine-Tuning and Data Work

20 уроков
1. Why next-token prediction is not yet an assistant
2. From instruction tuning to structured post-training
3. Three older ideas hiding inside SFT
4. Chat templates are executable contracts
5. Label masking: a 56-token example
6. Packing variable-length examples safely
7. Compute accounting and hyperparameters
8. Organizing SFT data by capability
9. Reading LIMA correctly
10. Synthetic data as a search-and-filter system
11. Reasoning demonstrations and the s1 compute scenario
12. Teaching a model to use tools
13. Level-one code: labels and traceable bins
14. What the notebook adds
15. Distillation channels
16. LoRA and a concrete parameter count
17. Reconstructing an SFT recipe from a checkpoint
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, notebook, and sources

Learning from Feedback: RLHF, DPO, RLOO, and GRPO

20 уроков
1. The signal changed: from imitation to judgment
2. From reward modelling to environment-scale RL
3. Three old ideas that organize the new vocabulary
4. Classical RLHF as an algorithmic contract
5. Worked example A: invert a Bradley–Terry model
6. DPO: eliminate the explicit reward model
7. Worked example B: read the DPO margin carefully
8. Direct preference losses differ by contract, not branding
9. RLOO and GRPO: construct a baseline from sibling rollouts
10. Worked example D: a deliberately simplified memory model
11. Worked example E: rollout generation can dwarf the update
12. What later GRPO variants are actually fixing
13. Level-one code: the numerical core
14. Level two: the executable notebook
15. RLVR still obeys Goodhart's law
16. Three open patterns: RLAIF, multi-stage reasoning, and…
17. How to read a post-training passport
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, notebook, and sources

Reasoning Models and Test-Time Compute

20 уроков
1. A second scaling axis
2. From longer traces to explicit controls
3. Three older ideas hiding inside test-time compute
4. What counts as a reasoning model?
5. What DeepSeek-R1 teaches us about training reasoning
6. Parallel scaling, worked example A: voting can get worse first
7. Worked example B: coverage is not selection accuracy
8. Sequential scaling and budget forcing
9. Failure modes of longer reasoning
10. Worked example C: an illustrative budget ladder
11. Worked example D: the KV cost of a thought
12. Worked example E: why adaptive allocation matters
13. Level-1 code: make selection and cost assumptions explicit
14. Level 2: the module notebook
15. Verifier families
16. Distilling reasoning traces
17. Reading a model's reasoning passport
18. Self-check
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, notebook, and sources

Multimodal LLMs: Vision, Audio, and Video

20 уроков
1. Motivation: every modality creates a new budget
2. Four families, four places to draw the boundary
3. Three older ideas provide the mental model
4. The first design: encoder, connector, language decoder
5. CLIP, SigLIP, and worked example C: reading InfoNCE numerically
6. Worked example A: three ways to spend visual tokens
7. Worked example B: when images create ordinary decoder KV
8. Connectors are budget control surfaces
9. Dynamic resolution turns image content into variable compute
10. Unified output reveals a conflict between semantics and fidelity
11. Worked example E: video is an information-selection problem
12. Thinker–Talker: coordinating two clocks
13. Code level 1: geometry before frameworks
14. Level 2: what the notebook makes reproducible
15. Audio is a continuous evidence stream
16. Reading the public landscape by design axis
17. Follow one request through a multimodal passport
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, notebook, and sources

Embeddings, Retrieval, and RAG

20 уроков
1. Motivation: one query, four opportunities to lose the answer
2. Historical progression: each generation restored a signal…
3. A bridge to classical methods: three old problems inside RAG
4. BM25 and learned sparse retrieval: the branch that protects…
5. Dense bi-encoders: learning a semantic space
6. Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL), quantization, and…
7. One vector, one pair, or a matrix: where query-document…
8. Worked example B: exact search and the arithmetic of ANN
9. ANN under the hood: three indexes for three resource constraints
10. Hybrid retrieval, reciprocal-rank fusion, and worked example F
11. Chunking: deciding what the index is allowed to retrieve
12. The full cascade and worked example D: where request latency…
13. Level-1 code: hybrid retrieval with explicit contracts
14. Level 2: what the notebook makes reproducible
15. The evolution of RAG: repair the measured failure, not the…
16. Worked example E: RAG or long context
17. Evaluation and the embedder passport
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, notebook, and sources

Agents and Tool Use

20 уроков
1. Motivation: a response becomes a trajectory
2. Historical arc: the control loop became a software platform
3. Classical foundations: planning, feedback control, and…
4. Anatomy of an agent loop
5. Function calling and guided generation: syntax is only the…
6. ReAct, Plan-and-Execute, and CodeAct: choosing an action…
7. Worked example A: context growth across the loop
8. Worked example B: what one agent step costs
9. MCP: standardizing connection without outsourcing trust
10. Production anatomy: the harness is part of the algorithm
11. Worked example C: reliability over a long trajectory
12. Subagents and Amdahl’s law
13. Level-1 code: a bounded protocol loop
14. Level 2: what the notebook makes reproducible
15. System landscape: compare action surfaces, not logos
16. Benchmarks: each measures a different agent–environment pair
17. Reading an agent-harness passport
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, notebook, and sources

Evaluating Modern LLM Systems: From Benchmarks to Decisions

20 уроков
1. Evaluation is an instrument for a decision
2. The historical arc: every evaluation regime repaired a failure
3. Classical measurement theory already knows most of the problems
4. How a benchmark loses measurement power
5. Build an evaluation map before choosing benchmark names
6. Worked example A: are 95.5% and 95.0% distinguishable?
7. Difficulty has several sources: HLE, FrontierMath, and ARC-AGI
8. pass@k: finding one solution is not the same as being reliable
9. Human arenas and composite indices answer someone else’s…
10. LLM judges: a synthetic 30-point illusion
11. Multimodal capability, safety, truthfulness, and honesty are…
12. Long context: accepted length versus usable evidence
13. A minimal evaluation harness: one call, one observed output
14. What the level-2 notebook makes observable
15. A private golden set in seven deliberate steps
16. Eight directions shaping evaluation as of August 2026
17. Read two passports: the benchmark and the reported run
18. Self-check questions
19. Exercises
20. Key takeaways, course finale, and sources

(reference). The Basic Transformer

22 урока
1. Why the Transformer was needed
2. Notation and tensor shapes
3. Step 1: tokens, embeddings, and positions
4. Step 2: scaled dot-product attention
5. Masks: who is allowed to see whom
6. Multi-head attention
7. The FFN: nonlinear processing at each position
8. Residual connections and LayerNorm
9. The encoder layer and encoder stack
10. The decoder layer and cross-attention
11. Training: teacher forcing and cross-entropy
12. Generation: the same forward pass in a different loop
13. A minimal scaled dot-product attention implementation
14. A minimal Transformer block
15. A complete shape trace for a toy model
16. The 2017 original and a modern LLM: what survived
17. Common confusions
18. Self-check
19. Exercises with solutions
20. The module notebook
21. Reading route and sources
22. Final cheat sheet and return to the core course

Capstone: build a MiniLLM from data to ablations

6 уроков
1. Project overview and environment
2. Pretraining: data, tokenizer, and training
3. Post-training: SFT and DPO
4. Inference: caching, speculative decoding, and quantization
5. Ablations and limits of the conclusions
6. Final report and self-assessment