Exponential-Min and Gumbel-Max
Exponential-min and Gumbel-max tricks for reformulating sampling from a discrete distribution as argmin and argmax, making the sampling operation differentiable.
•2 min read•
Blog
55 posts
From Transformers to ChatGPT
This note provides a high-level summary of the progress in large language models (LLMs) covering major milestones from Transformers to ChatGPT. The note serves as a fast-paced recap for readers to catch up on this field quickly.
•36 min read•
List of Advice
•9 min read•
Expectation-Maximization Algorithm in 10 Minutes
A quick walk-through of Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and its cousins.
•11 min read•
Reinforcement Learning in LLMs - Why and How
Why RL matters for LLMs and how to train them: SFT vs RLHF, verifiable rewards (RLVR), and a practical GRPO-style recipe.
•9 min read•
Diffusion Models
This is the first post of hopefully a series of post walking through diffusion models. This post will introduce the foundations, focusing on two foundational papers, that many other papers built upon.
•5 min read•
Life Is Short, a Reading List
•1 min read•
From PPO to DPO: Why Pairwise Preferences + Max-Entropy Make RL Optional
Tracing the evolution from PPO-based RLHF to Direct Preference Optimization, through Bradley–Terry and the maximum entropy principle.
•3 min read•
Reparameterization vs REINFORCE
Two ways to differentiate expectations: REINFORCE (score-function) vs reparameterization (pathwise), and why the pathwise estimator trains VAEs more stably.
•4 min read•
Speculative Decoding: Exact Speedups with Draft Models
Speed up LLM sampling using a small draft model and a batched verifier while preserving the exact target distribution.
•3 min read•
Maximum Likelihood and Maximum Entropy
How MLE fits parameters and MaxEnt justifies exponential-family model forms.
•6 min read•
Popper's Paradox: the Misuse of Tolerance Arguments
How Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance is often misinterpreted and used to justify authoritarianism, when Popper was actually warning against exactly that.
•3 min read•
Quoting Ezra
•2 min read•
A Poem about Human Suffering
•1 min read•
Quoting Kazuo Ishiguro
•1 min read•
Path to Mastery
•1 min read•
Inner Peace Requires External Validation
•1 min read•
Hume’s Law
•1 min read•
The Real Luxuries in Life
•1 min read•
2024 EOY Reflections
•9 min read•
Tweets from @AmuseChimp
•26 min read•
Dopamine
There has been a lot of confusing information about dopamine. I finally found a literature review-style article, and here is what I learned.
•5 min read•
Notes on Endurance
•1 min read•
London
•1 min read•
Quoting the BlackBerry Movie
•1 min read•
Quoting the History of Rome Podcast
•1 min read•
Quoting Succession TV Show
•1 min read•
Quoting Joshua Bach
•1 min read•
NanoGPT Repo Reading Notes
nanoGPT repo reading notes
•1 min read•
Building LLM-Powered Products
This is a quick note to discuss a few topics below related to building LLM-powered products and applications, such as how to let LLM use tools and become autonomous agents, how to incorporate domain adaptation, and the production hurdles.
•8 min read•
How Does Auto-GPT Work?
In this note, we'll take a look at how Auto-GPT work and discuss LLM's ability to do explicit reasoning and to become an autonomous agent. We'll touch upon a few related works such as WebGPT, Toolformer, and Langchain.
•5 min read•
Italy
In October 2021, we spent two weeks traveling to various cities in Italy, including Rome, Cinque Terre, Florence, Tuscany, and Venice. This was our first trip to Italy, and we have documented our journey with a report and photos.
•9 min read•
Utah
Trip report (itinerary and photos) from our recent trip to southern Utah (Zion, Arches, Canyonlands and Bryce).
•7 min read•
Recent Progress in Language Modeling
This page is a high-level summary / notes of various recent results in language modeling with little explanations
•3 min read•
NLP Starter Resources
A list of starter resources for Natural Language Processing (NLP), mostly with deep learning.
•1 min read•
Quantitative Tech Interview Preparation Guide
A short list of interview preparation resources for Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, Machine Learning Scientists, Quant Developers and Quant Researchers.
•6 min read•
Recent Progress in Neural Variational Inference
A literature survey of recent papers on Neural Variational Inference (NVI) and its application in topic modeling.
•1 min read•
A Brief Survey of Generative Models
A high-level summary of various generative models including Variational Autoencoders (VAE), Generative Adverserial Networks (GAN), and their notable extentions and generalizations, such as f-GAN, Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB), Wasserstein GAN, Wasserstein Auto-Encoder (WAE), Cramer GAN and etc
•7 min read•
How to Measure HRV
•1 min read•
TIL: React Server Components
•4 min read•
Cello Etudes Difficulty Table
•2 min read•
David Popper
•10 min read•
Hiragana and Katakana for Chinese Speakers
•2 min read•
How to Add a Table of Contents in Ghost without Editing the Site Template
How to add a table of contents in Ghost without editing the site template
•1 min read•
How to Add EmailOctopus Form to a React App
EmailOctopus form is a script tag, this post shows how to make that work with React (using useEffect and useRef).
•1 min read•
React, Redux and Redux-Saga
A short note about the evolution from React to the need of Redux and some supporting tool chain for it.
•3 min read•
Next.js: Firebase Authentication and Middleware for API Routes
Building Next.js app with Firebase authentication on the client-side, as well as using it on the server-side with a middleware pattern similar to Express.js.
•6 min read•
My Frontend Learning Plan - 2021
My plan and progress updates on learning web frontend development more or less from scratch. Will be semi-regularly updated.
•9 min read•
My Takeaways from "State of JS 2020"
My takeaways from State of JS 2020 survey.
•3 min read•
How to Enable Preview for Member-Only Content in Ghost
Automatically add preview / teaser content for Member-Only posts in Ghost.
•5 min read•
Demo: Member-Only Content Preview
This is a demo for "How to Enable Preview for Member-Only Content in Ghost"
•2 min read•
Ghost Themes Local Development Setup
Local development setup for Ghost themes.
•2 min read•
Featured-First Post Order in Ghost
Making featured posts show up first in Ghost Casper theme (instead of the default reverse chronological order).
•1 min read•
Editing Tips for Ghost
I recently switched to Ghost to host my blog, Here are some editing tips as I learn to use this platform.
•2 min read•
Moving to Ghost
My onboarding experience with Ghost and some wishlist items for future improvements.
•3 min read•
End of posts • 55 posts