EE/CS 148B · Spring 2026

Large Language & Vision Models

This course introduces the foundations, design, training, and evaluation of large language models and vision-language models, with an emphasis on modern multimodal systems, reasoning, alignment, and emerging research directions.

Caltech Tue / Thu, 10.30am - 11.55am Chen 100

Course staff

Lecturer & TAs

Georgia

Instructor

Georgia Gkioxari

Ziqi

Teaching Assistant

Ziqi Ma

Damiano

Teaching Assistant

Damiano Marsili

Aadarsh

Teaching Assistant

Aadarsh Sahoo

Vansh

Teaching Assistant

Vansh Tibrewal

Vikrant

Teaching Assistant

Vikrant Malik

Sreeyutha

Teaching Assistant

Sreeyutha Ratala


Lecture schedule

Spring 2026 Schedule

Date Topic Notes
Lecture 1
Tue, Mar 31
 Course overview
  • ➤ why large language and vision models now?
  • ➤ the foundations of modern AI
  • ➤ course content, grading and policies
 syllabus (doc) · slides (pdf)
Lecture 2
Thu, Apr 2
 Transformer I: Self-Attention
  • ➤ Motivation of attention
  • ➤ Self-attention block
  • ➤ Transformer Encoder
 slides (pdf) · Assignment 1: Build an LM from Scratch (source)
Lecture 3
Tue, Apr 7
Lecture 4
Thu, Apr 9
Lecture 5
Tue, Apr 14
Lecture 6
Thu, Apr 16
Lecture 7
Tue, Apr 21
Lecture 8
Thu, Apr 23
Lecture 9
Tue, Apr 28
Lecture 10
Thu, Apr 30
Lecture 11
Tue, May 5
Lecture 12
Thu, May 7
Lecture 13
Tue, May 12
Lecture 14
Thu, May 14
Lecture 15
Tue, May 19
Lecture 16
Thu, May 21
Lecture 17
Tue, May 26
Lecture 18
Thu, May 28