Prasanth Yadla: Advanced Concepts in Transformers for Deep Learning, Gebunden

Klappentext

Advanced Concepts in Transformers for Deep Learning goes beyond explaining what transformer architectures do to reveal why they work and how to extend them for modern applications in large language models (LLMs), generative AI, and deep learning. It is written for researchers and machine learning engineers who have outgrown introductory treatments and need rigorous mathematical and implementation-level understanding of advanced AI.

The book develops genuine mathematical fluency across the full transformer neural network landscape, including rigorous derivations of attention mechanisms, positional encodings, state space models such as mamba, recent architectures such as mixture-of-experts, alongside concrete implementations that connect theory directly to practice in modern deep learning.

It spans efficient, sparse, and scalable attention mechanisms for large language models, as well as vision and multimodal transformers, graph neural networks, speech architectures, and natural language processing (NLP) including pre-trained language models and sequence-to-sequence models. It also covers modern generative AI techniques, including parameter-efficient fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), multi-agent systems, tool-augmented LLMs, hybrid Transformer--SSM architectures, speculative decoding, and FlashAttention-based optimizations.

Advanced optimization techniques are treated in depth, including adaptive optimizers, learning rate scheduling, gradient clipping, and regularization strategies for stable deep learning training. These are presented alongside large-scale distributed training systems for LLMs, including data, model, pipeline, tensor, and context parallelism, as well as production frameworks such as DeepSpeed and Fully Sharded Data Parallel (FSDP).

Inference and deployment of large language models are covered with equal rigor, including quantization, KV-cache optimization, continuous batching, memory-efficient decoding strategies, paged attention, and disaggregated prefill--decode architectures. These techniques are essential for building scalable, low-latency AI systems and LLM inference pipelines.

The book also addresses alignment and reinforcement learning for large language models, including reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Constitutional AI, along with advanced prompt engineering frameworks such as chain-of-thought and tree-of-thought reasoning for improving LLM performance and controllability.

Interpretability, robustness, safety, and ethical alignment are treated as core design principles throughout, rather than isolated topics, reflecting the requirements of modern responsibleAI systems and foundation model development. Hands-on chapters guide readers from scratch implementations of transformer components through case studies, bridging theory and hands-on development.

A working knowledge of deep learning fundamentals and basic transformers is assumed. Whether designing new transformer architectures, building large language models, ordeploying generative AI systems at scale, this book serves as a rigorous, comprehensive reference for advanced practitioners in machine learning engineering and AI research.