CS 639, Spring 2026
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Meets: Tuesdays & Thursdays. First day: Tue. Jan. 20, 2026. Last day: Thu. Apr. 30, 2026.
This schedule is tentative and subject to change. Please check back often. In particular, the deadlines for the homework sets/project may change.
| Date | Lecture | Readings | Homework Release | Homework Due |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tuesday Jan. 20 | Lecture 1: Class Overview and What Is an FM? | — | — | |
| Thursday Jan. 22 | Lecture 2: Machine Learning: Review | — | — | |
| Tuesday Jan. 27 | Lecture 3: Deep Learning: A Quick Intro I | — | — | |
| Thursday Jan. 29 | Lecture 4: Deep Learning: A Quick Intro II | — | — | |
| Tuesday Feb. 3 | Lecture 5: Self-Supervised Learning | — | — | |
| Thursday Feb. 5 | Lecture 6: Nick Roberts: The Science of Foundation Models |
|
— | — |
| Tuesday Feb. 10 | Lecture 7: Transformers and Attention | HW 1 Out | — | |
| Thursday Feb. 12 | Lecture 8: Transformers and Attention II | — | — | |
| Tuesday Feb. 17 | Lecture 9: Architectures I | — | — | |
| Thursday Feb. 19 | Lecture 10: Architectures II | — | — | |
| Tuesday Feb. 24 | Lecture 11: Attention Variants | HW 2 Out | HW 1 Due | |
| Thursday Feb. 26 | Lecture 12: Multimodal Architectures I | — | — | |
| Tuesday Mar. 3 | Lecture 13: Multimodal Architectures II | — | — | |
| Thursday Mar. 5 | Lecture 14: Prompting, ICL, and Others | — | — | |
| Tuesday Mar. 10 | Lecture 15: Specialization: Fine-Tuning & Adaptation I | HW 2 Due | — | |
| Thursday Mar. 12 | Lecture 16: Specialization: Fine-Tuning & Adaptation II | — | — | |
| Tuesday Mar. 17 | Lecture 17: Alignment I | — | — | |
| Thursday Mar. 19 | Lecture 18: Alignment II | — | — | |
| Tuesday Mar. 24 | Lecture 19: Reasoning I: CoT | — | — | |
| Thursday Mar. 26 | Lecture 20: Reasoning II: RLVR and Otbers | — | — | |
| Tuesday Mar. 31 | No class — Spring Break | |||
| Thursday Apr. 2 | No class — Spring Break | |||
| Tuesday Apr. 7 | Lecture 21: Evaluation I: Metrics and Benchmarks | — | Project Proposal Due | |
| Thursday Apr. 9 | Lecture 22: Evaluation II | — | — | |
| Tuesday Apr. 14 | Lecture 23: Scaling I: Laws, MoEs and More | — | — | |
| Thursday Apr. 16 | Lecture 24: Scaling II: Test-time Scaling | — | — | |
| Tuesday Apr. 21 | Lecture 25: Agents I | — | — | |
| Thursday Apr. 23 | Lecture 26: Agents II | — | — | |
| Tuesday Apr. 28 | Lecture 27: |
— | — | |
| Thursday Apr. 30 | Lecture 28: All Other Topics: Applications, Models, Future Areas | — | — | Tuesday May 7 | - |
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— | Project Report Due |