Course Description
Ever wondered how AI technologies like OpenAI ChatGPT, GPT-4, Gemini Pro, Llama 3, DALL-E 3, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion really work? In this course, you will learn the foundations of these groundbreaking applications.Hello friends!
Welcome to Data Science: Transformers for Natural Language Processing.
Ever since Transformers arrived on the scene, deep learning hasn't been the same.
- Machine learning is able to generate text essentially indistinguishable from that created by humans
- We've reached new state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks, such as machine translation, question-answering, entailment, named entity recognition, and more
- We've created multi-modal (text and image) models that can generate amazing art using only a text prompt
- We've solved a longstanding problem in molecular biology known as "protein structure prediction"
In this course, you will learn very practical skills for applying transformers, and if you want, detailed theory behind how transformers and attention work.
This is different from most other resources, which only cover the former.
The course is split into 3 major parts:
- Using Transformers
- Fine-Tuning Transformers
- Transformers In-Depth
PART 1: Using Transformers
In this section, you will learn how to use transformers which were trained for you. This costs millions of dollars to do, so it's not something you want to try by yourself!
We'll see how these prebuilt models can already be used for a wide array of tasks, including:
- text classification (e.g. spam detection, sentiment analysis, document categorization)
- named entity recognition
- text summarization
- machine translation
- question-answering
- generating (believable) text
- masked language modeling (article spinning)
- zero-shot classification
This is already very practical.
If you need to do sentiment analysis, document categorization, entity recognition, translation, summarization, etc. on documents at your workplace or for your clients - you already have the most powerful state-of-the-art models at your fingertips with very few lines of code.
One of the most amazing applications is "zero-shot classification", where you will observe that a pretrained model can categorize your documents, even without any training at all.
PART 2: Fine-Tuning Transformers
In this section, you will learn how to improve the performance of transformers on your own custom datasets. By using "transfer learning", you can leverage the millions of dollars of training that have already gone into making transformers work very well.
You'll see that you can fine-tune a transformer with relatively little work (and little cost).
We'll cover how to fine-tune transformers for the most practical tasks in the real-world, like text classification (sentiment analysis, spam detection), entity recognition, and machine translation.
PART 3: Transformers In-Depth
In this section, you will learn how transformers really work. The previous sections are nice, but a little too nice. Libraries are OK for people who just want to get the job done, but they don't work if you want to do anything new or interesting.
Let's be clear: this is very practical.
How practical, you might ask?
Well, this is where the big bucks are.
Those who have a deep understanding of these models and can do things no one has ever done before are in a position to command higher salaries and prestigious titles. Machine learning is a competitive field, and a deep understanding of how things work can be the edge you need to come out on top.
We'll look at the inner workings of encoders, decoders, encoder-decoders, BERT, GPT, GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 (for the latter, we are limited to what OpenAI has revealed).
We'll also look at how to implement transformers from scratch.
As the great Richard Feynman once said, "what I cannot create, I do not understand".
SUGGESTED PREREQUISITES:
- Decent Python coding skills
- Deep learning with CNNs and RNNs useful but not required
- Deep learning with Seq2Seq models useful but not required
- For the in-depth section: understanding the theory behind CNNs, RNNs, and seq2seq is very useful
Thank you for reading and I hope to see you soon!
Lectures
- 16 sections
- 143 lectures
- 20h 17m total length
Reviews
38 reviews for this course
Testimonials and Success Stories
H. Z.
“I am one of your students. Yesterday, I presented my paper at ICCV 2019. You have a significant part in this, so I want to sincerely thank you for your in-depth guidance to the puzzle of deep learning. Please keep making awesome courses that teach us!”
Wade J.
“I just watched your short video on “Predicting Stock Prices with LSTMs: One Mistake Everyone Makes.” Giggled with delight.
You probably already know this, but some of us really and truly appreciate you. BTW, I spent a reasonable amount of time making a learning roadmap based on your courses and have started the journey.
Looking forward to your new stuff.”
Kris M.
“Thank you for doing this! I wish everyone who call’s themselves a Data Scientist would take the time to do this either as a refresher or learn the material. I have had to work with so many people in prior roles that wanted to jump right into machine learning on my teams and didn’t even understand the first thing about the basics you have in here!!
I am signing up so that I have the easy refresh when needed and the see what you consider important, as well as to support your great work, thank you.”
Steve M.
“I have been intending to send you an email expressing my gratitude for the work that you have done to create all of these data science courses in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. I have been looking long and hard for courses that have mathematical rigor relative to the application of the ML & AI algorithms as opposed to just exhibit some 'canned routine' and then viola here is your neural network or logistical regression.
Your courses are just what I have been seeking. I am a retired mathematician, statistician and Supply Chain executive from a large Fortune 500 company in Ohio. I also taught mathematics, statistics and operations research courses at a couple of universities in Northern Ohio.
I have taken many courses and have enjoyed the journey, I am not going to be critical of any of the organizations from whom I have taken courses. However, when I read a review about one of your courses in which the student was complaining that one would need a PhD in Mathematics to understand it, I knew this was the course (or series of courses) that I wanted. (Having advanced degrees in mathematics, I knew that it was highly unlikely that a PhD would actually be required.)”
Saurabh W.
“Hi Sir I am a student from India. I've been wanting to write a note to thank you for the courses that you've made because they have changed my career. I wanted to work in the field of data science but I was not having proper guidance but then I stumbled upon your "Logistic Regression" course in March and since then, there's been no looking back. I learned ANNs, CNNs, RNNs, Tensorflow, NLP and whatnot by going through your lectures. The knowledge that I gained enabled me to get a job as a Business Technology Analyst at one of my dream firms even in the midst of this pandemic. For that, I shall always be grateful to you. Please keep making more courses with the level of detail that you do in low-level libraries like Theano.”
David P.
“I just wanted to reach out and thank you for your most excellent course that I am nearing finishing.
And, I couldn't agree more with some of your "rants", and found myself nodding vigorously!
You are an excellent teacher, and a rare breed.
And, your courses are frankly, more digestible and teach a student far more than some of the top-tier courses from ivy leagues I have taken in the past.
(I plan to go through many more courses, one by one!)
I know you must be deluged with complaints in spite of the best content around That's just human nature.
Also, satisfied people rarely take the time to write, so I thought I will write in for a change. :)”
P. C.
“Hello, Lazy Programmer!
In the process of completing my Master’s at Hunan University, China, I am writing this feedback to you in order to express my deep gratitude for all the knowledge and skills I have obtained studying your courses and following your recommendations.
The first course of yours I took was on Convolutional Neural Networks (“Deep Learning p.5”, as far as I remember). Answering one of my questions on the Q&A board, you suggested I should start from the beginning – the Linear and Logistic Regression courses. Despite that I assumed I had already known many basic things at that time, I overcame my “pride” and decided to start my journey in Deep Learning from scratch.
Course by course, I was renewing the basics and the prerequisites. Thus, in several months, after every day studying under your guidance, I was able to gain enough intuitions and practical skills in order to begin progressing in my research. Having a solid background, it was just a pleasure to read all the relevant papers in the field as well as to make all the experiments needed for achieving my goal – creating a high-performance CNN for offline HCCR.
I believe, the professionalism of any teacher can be estimated by the feedback received from their students, and it’s of the utmost importance for me to thank you, Lazy Programmer!
I want you to know, in spite, that we have never actually met and you haven’t taught me privately, I consider you one of my greatest Teachers.
The most important things I have learned from you (some in the hard way, though) beside many exciting modern Deep Learning/AI techniques and algorithms are:
1) If one doesn’t know how to program something, one doesn’t understand it completely.
2) If one is not honest with oneself about one’s prior knowledge, one will never succeed in studying more advanced things.
3) Developing skills in BOTH Math and Programming is what makes one a good student of this major.
I am still studying your courses, and am certain I will ask you more than just a few technical questions regarding their content, but I already would like to say, that I will remember your contribution to my adventure in the Deep Learning field, and consider it as big as one of such great scientists’ as Andrew Ng, Geoffrey Hinton, and my supervisor.
Thank you, Lazy Programmer! 非常感谢您，Lazy 老师！
If you are interested, you can find my first paper’s preprint here:
https://arxiv.org/abs/xxx”
Dima K.
“By the way, if you are interested to hear. I used the HMM classification, as it was in your course (95% of the script, I had little adjustments there), for the Customer-Care department in a big known fintech company. to predict who will call them, so they can call him before the rush hours, and improve the service. Instead of a poem, I Had a sequence of the last 24 hours' events that the customer had, like: "Loaded money", "Usage in the food service", "Entering the app", "Trying to change the password", etc... the label was called or didn't call. The outcome was great. They use it for their VIP customers. Our data science department and I got a lot of praise.”
Andres Lopez C.
“This course is exactly what I was looking for. The instructor does an impressive job making students understand they need to work hard in order to learned. The examples are clear, and the explanations of the theory is very interesting.”
Mohammed K.
“Thank you, I think you have opened my eyes. I was using API to implement Deep learning algorithms and each time I felt I was messing out on some things. So thank you very much.”
Tom P.
“I have now taken a few classes from some well-known AI profs at Stanford (Andrew Ng, Christopher Manning, …) with an overall average mark in the mid-90s. Just so you know, you are as good as any of them. But I hope that you already know that.
I wish you a happy and safe holiday season. I am glad you chose to share your knowledge with the rest of us.”
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