X
99220041851@[Link]
([Link]
([Link]
NPTEL ([Link] » Introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs)
(course)
Click to register
for Certification
exam
Introduction to Large Language
([Link] Models (LLMs)
ABOUT THE COURSE:
If already This course introduces the fundamental concepts underlying Large Language Models (LLMs). It
registered, click starts with an introduction to the various problems in NLP, and discusses how to approach the
to check your problem of language modeling using deep learning. It describes the architectural intricacies of
Transformers and the pre-training objectives of the different Transformer-based models. It also
payment status
discusses the recent advances in LLM research, including LLM alignment, prompting,
parameter-efficient adaptation, hallucination, bias and ethical considerations. This course
prepares a student to comprehend, critique and approach various research problems on LLMs.
Course
outline INTENDED AUDIENCE: UG and PG students in CSE, EE, ECE, IT, Maths, etc.
About NPTEL PREREQUISITES: Mandatory: Machine Learning, Python Programming Optional: Deep
() Learning
Introduction To Machine Learning: [Link]
How does an ([Link]
NPTEL online Python for Data Science: [Link]
course work? ([Link]
()
Week 1 () INDUSTRY SUPPORT: All those industries whose work involves machine learning, such as
Google, Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Accenture, JP Morgan, Wipro, Flipkart, Amazon, etc.
Week 2 ()
Week 3 ()
Problem
Solving
Session - Jan
2026 ()
Introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs)
Professor Tanmoy Chakraborty holds the Rajiv
Khemani Young Faculty Chair in AI and an
Associate Professor at IIT Delhi. He leads
the Laboratory for Computational Social Systems
([Link] (LCS2), a research group
that primarily focuses on building economical,
interpretable and faithful language models and
applying them specifically to mental health and
Prof. cyber-informatics. He served as visiting professor
Tanmoy at MPI Saarbrucken, TU Munich and TU
Chakrabor Darmstadt. Tanmoy did his PhD as a Google
ty PhD Scholar at IIT Kharagpur and postdoc at
University of Maryland. Tanmoy has received
IIT Delhi numerous faculty fellowships, including the
Ramanujan, DAAD, Humboldt, ELISE, PECFAR,
and several faculty awards from industries like
Google, LinkedIn, JP Morgan, IBM, and Adobe.
He has authored two textbooks -- "Social
Network Analysis" and "Introduction to Large
Language Models", on which he has been
offering NPTEL courses. He is an ACM
Distinguished Speaker. More details may be
found at [Link]
([Link]
[Link] Chakrabarti is a Professor of
Computer Science at IIT Bombay. He works on
linking unstructured text to knowledge bases and
exploiting these links for better search and
ranking. Other interests include link formation
and influence propagation in social networks,
and personalized proximity search in graphs. He
has published extensively in WWW, ACL,
EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, SIGKDD,
VLDB, SIGIR, ICDE and other conferences. He
won the best paper award at WWW 1999. He
was coauthor on the best student paper at ECML
Prof. 2008. His work on keyword search in databases
Soumen got the 10-year influential paper award at ICDE
2012. He got his PhD from University of
Chakrabor
California, Berkeley and worked on Clever Web
ti
search and Focused Crawling at IBM Almaden
IIT Bombay Research Center. He has also worked at
Carnegie-Mellon University and Google. He
received the Bhatnagar Prize in 2014 and the
Jagadis Bose Fellowship in 2019.
COURSE TYPE
Elective
COURSE LEVEL
Undergraduate/Postgraduate
COURSE LAYOUT
Week 1
1. Course Introduction
2. Introduction to NLP (NLP Pipeline, Applications of NLP)
Week 2
1. Introduction to Statistical Language Models
2. Statistical Language Models: Advanced Smoothing and Evaluation
Week 3
1. Introduction to Deep Learning (Perceptron, ANN, Backpropagation, CNN)
2. Introduction to PyTorch
Week 4
1. Word Representation
a. Word2Vec, fastText
b. GloVe
2. Tokenization Strategies
Week 5
1. Neural Language Models
a. CNN, RNN
b. LSTM, GRU
2. Sequence-to-Sequence Models, Greedy Decoding, Beam search
3. Other Decoding Strategies: Nucleus Sampling, Temperature Sampling, Top-k Sampling
4. Attention in Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Week 6
1. Introduction to Transformers
a. Self and Multi-Head Attention
b. Positional Encoding and Layer Normalization
2. Implementation of Transformers using PyTorch
Week 7
1. Pre-Training Strategies: ELMo, BERT (Encoder-only Model)
2. Pre-Training Strategies: Encoder-decoder and Decoder-only Models
3. Introduction to HuggingFace
Week 8
1. Instruction Tuning
2. Prompt-based Learning
3. Advanced Prompting Techniques and Prompt Sensitivity
4. Alignment of Language Models with Human Feedback (RLHF)
Week 9
1. Open-book question answering: The case for retrieving from structured and unstructured
sources;retrieval-augmented inference and generation
2. Retrieval augmentation techniques
a. Key-value memory networks in QA for simple paths in KGs
b. Early HotPotQA solvers, pointer networks, reading comprehension
c. REALM, RAG, FiD, Unlimiformer
d. KGQA (e.g., EmbedKGQA, GrailQA)
Week 10
1. Knowledge graphs (KGs)
a. Representation, completion
b. Tasks: Alignment and isomorphism
c. Distinction between graph neural networks and neural KG inference
Week 11
1. Parameter-efficient Adaptation (Prompt Tuning, Prefix Tuning, LoRA)
2. An Alternate Formulation of Transformers: Residual Stream Perspective
3. Interpretability Techniques
Week 12
1. Overview of recently popular models such as GPT-4, Llama-3, Claude-3,Mistral, and
Gemini
2. Ethical NLP – Bias and Toxicity
3. Conclusion
BOOKS AND REFERENCES
Tanmoy Chakraborty, Introduction to Large Language Models, Wiley India, 1st Edition,
2025. ISBN : 9789363864740 ([Link]
Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 2nd edition,
Pearson Press, 2008.
Jacob Eisenstein, Natural Language Processing, First edition,The MIT Press, 2019.
Research papers published in conferences/journals like Association for Computational
Linguistics (ACL), Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), North
American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Neural
Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), International Conference on Machine
Learning (ICML), International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR),
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Transactions of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), Computational Linguistics (CL), Journal
of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), Transactions on Machine Learning Research
(TMLR).
CERTIFICATE
The course is free to enroll and learn from. But if you want a certificate, you have to register and
write the proctored exam conducted by us in person at any of the designated exam centres.
The exam is optional for a fee of Rs 1000/- (Rupees one thousand only).
Date and Time of Exams : April 17, 2026 Morning session 9am to 12 noon; Afternoon Session
2pm to 5pm.
Registration url: Announcements will be made when the registration form is open for registrations.
The online registration form has to be filled and the certification exam fee needs to be paid. More
details will be made available when the exam registration form is published. If there are any
changes, it will be mentioned then.
Please check the form for more details on the cities where the exams will be held, the conditions you
agree to when you fill the form etc.
CRITERIA TO GET A CERTIFICATE
Average assignment score = 25% of average of best 8 assignments out of the total 12 assignments
given in the course.
Exam score = 75% of the proctored certification exam score out of 100
Final score = Average assignment score + Exam score
Please note that assignments encompass all types (including quizzes, programming
tasks, and essay submissions) available in the specific week.
YOU WILL BE ELIGIBLE FOR A CERTIFICATE ONLY IF AVERAGE ASSIGNMENT SCORE
>=10/25 AND EXAM SCORE >= 30/75. If one of the 2 criteria is not met, you will not get the
certificate even if the Final score >= 40/100.
Certificate will have your name, photograph and the score in the final exam with the [Link] will
have the logos of NPTEL and IIT Madras. It will be e-verifiable at [Link]/noc
([Link]
Only the e-certificate will be made available. Hard copies will not be dispatched.
Once again, thanks for your interest in our online courses and certification. Happy learning.
- NPTEL team