LLM
157 bites tagged LLM — interview questions with model answers, and 60-second explainers.
LLM Guardrails: Keeping Model Outputs on Track
LLM guardrails are safety policies that steer model outputs, acting like bumpers in a bowling alley to prevent responses from going off-topic, leaking data, or generating harmful content. They are crucial for topic control and preventing prompt injections.
LLM Red Teaming: Adversarial Security Testing
LLM Red Teaming is a simulated attack where you proactively try to break your own AI to find security flaws. It's used to test for vulnerabilities like prompt injection or data leakage, which traditional security tools miss.
The AI Alignment Problem
AI alignment is about making sure an AI pursues our intended goals, not just the literal instructions. It's critical for autonomous systems in medicine or finance. The footgun is assuming a clear objective prevents unintended, harmful outcomes.
HumanEval: Testing if AI-Generated Code Actually Works
HumanEval is a benchmark that tests if an LLM's generated code is functionally correct, not just syntactically valid. It's used to compare models like Codex by having them solve programming puzzles.
LLM-as-a-Judge: Using Models to Grade Models
Instead of paying humans to rate AI outputs, LLM-as-a-Judge uses a powerful 'judge' model to do it automatically. This is used to evaluate chatbot responses or summarization quality, but the main footgun is assuming the judge model is unbiased or perfectly…
Why Elo Ratings for LLMs Can Be Misleading
Elo ranks LLMs like chess players, but models have fixed skills, not dynamic ones. This method powers leaderboards but produces volatile scores, meaning a model's rank can be an unstable estimate of its true, unchanging ability.
MMLU Benchmark
MMLU (Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding) is a popular benchmark for evaluating large language models. Its influence is shown by its many spin-offs, making it a foundational tool for comparing AI capabilities.
BERTScore: Judging AI Text on Meaning, Not Just Words
BERTScore evaluates AI-generated text by comparing its meaning to a reference, not just matching words. It's used to score machine translation or summarization where phrasing can vary.
HellaSwag: A Benchmark Designed to Fool LLMs
HellaSwag is a commonsense benchmark designed to fool language models. It asks an AI to pick the most logical sentence ending, but the wrong answers are specifically generated to trick machines, not humans. It's used to test for true contextual understanding.
Human Evaluation: Judging AI When Metrics Aren't Enough
Human evaluation is the ultimate reality check for AI, using people to judge qualities like fluency and coherence that automated scores can't capture. It's essential for tasks like summarization but is too slow and costly to use for everything.
Text-to-Video Generation: From Prompt to Picture Show
Text-to-video models are like a film director in a box, turning written descriptions into moving pictures. This tech, powered by video diffusion models, is used for creating short-form content or prototyping visual ideas from a simple text prompt.
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs): Beyond Text
An LMM is like a large language model that can also see and hear. It processes and connects information from multiple sources—like text, images, and audio—to perform tasks like describing a picture or answering questions about a video.
Multimodal Fusion: Combining Senses for AI
Multimodal fusion lets an AI combine data types like text, images, and audio into one understanding, much like a human brain. It's key for visual question answering or analyzing video sentiment.
Multimodal Models: Beyond Just Text
A multimodal model understands the world by connecting different data types, like images and text, instead of just one. It's how AI generates images from descriptions or answers questions about a photo. The footgun is assuming more data types always helps.
Multi-Agent Systems: A Team of AIs, Not a Monolith
Instead of one giant AI, a Multi-Agent System is a team of specialized AIs that collaborate on a complex problem. This appears in LLM-powered coding assistants and complex simulations.
LLM Agents: Giving Models Tools and a Plan
An LLM Agent gives a model tools and a plan to solve complex problems. Instead of just answering a question, it breaks it down, uses APIs or code interpreters, and remembers past steps. The footgun is thinking RAG is an agent; agents need planning and.
Graph RAG: Answering Questions with Connected Facts
Graph RAG answers complex questions by exploring a map of connected facts (a knowledge graph) instead of just searching flat text. Use it for queries needing synthesis, like finding drugs for a disease made by companies in a specific country.
HyDE: Find Documents by Embedding a Fake Answer
Instead of embedding a short query, HyDE uses an LLM to generate a full, hypothetical answer document. This vector, representing an ideal answer, is then used to find similar real documents, improving zero-shot retrieval. The generated document is fictional.
Self-Querying Retriever: Let an LLM Write Its Own Filters
A self-querying retriever uses an LLM to turn a natural language question into a structured query with metadata filters. It lets users ask things like "Find documents about Python from before 2020," which a simple vector search can't do.
LLMs Get 'Lost in the Middle' of Long Contexts
LLMs struggle to find information buried in the middle of long prompts. Performance is highest when key facts are at the beginning or end of the context. This impacts multi-document QA and RAG.
Context Stuffing: Giving LLMs Short-Term Memory
Context stuffing adds external documents to an LLM's prompt, giving it temporary, task-specific knowledge. Use it for one-off questions on specific docs, but beware: it fails when documents exceed the model's context window limit, causing truncated data.
Dense Passage Retrieval (DPR): Semantic Search for QA
DPR finds answers by meaning, not just keywords. It converts questions and documents into vectors and finds the closest matches, forming the core of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Embedding Models: The 'Retrieval' in RAG
An embedding model acts like a librarian for your data, converting text into numerical vectors so similar concepts are grouped together. In RAG, it finds relevant documents to feed an LLM, but using the wrong model type will yield poor retrieval results.
QLoRA: Finetune Huge LLMs on a Single GPU
QLoRA lets you finetune massive LLMs on one GPU by freezing the model in a 4-bit state and only training tiny adapter layers. Use it to adapt a 65B model with limited hardware. The footgun: performance hinges on high-quality data, not just the technique.
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