AI Specialization Program

• Soft AI Academy
AI Specialization Program
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Technical Tracks
AI Engineering & Data
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Week 5

WEEK 5 :

NLP, Transformers & Generative AI Engineering

Theme: Building Modern LLM-Powered Systems

Week 5 focuses on:

Understanding and engineering systems around Large Language Models.

Not just using ChatGPT —

building controlled, production-aware GenAI systems.

Week 5 —

6 Lesson Structure

Lesson 1:

NLP Foundations

Focus:

Text as data

Tokenization

Embeddings intuition

Text preprocessing

Traditional NLP vs modern NLP

Outcome: Students understand how machines process language numerically.

Lesson 2:

Transformers & LLM Architecture

Focus:

Attention mechanism intuition

Transformer architecture overview

Encoder vs Decoder models

Why LLMs scale

Context windows

Outcome: Students understand how modern LLMs work internally.

Lesson 3:

Hugging Face Ecosystem

Focus:

Hugging Face Datasets

Transformers library

Loading pre-trained models

Running inference

Model cards & documentation

Outcome: Students can use pre-trained transformer models properly.

Lesson 4:

Prompt Engineering & LLM Evaluation

Focus:

Prompt structuring techniques

Role prompting

Few-shot prompting

Chain-of-thought

Hallucination awareness

Basic LLM evaluation methods

Outcome: Students can design reliable LLM interactions.

Lesson 5:

RAG Systems & Simple Agents

Focus:

What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?

Vector databases (FAISS / Chroma concept)

Embedding search intuition

Simple agent concepts (ReAct / tool-calling idea)

Controlled generation systems

Outcome: Students can design structured LLM pipelines beyond simple prompts.

Lesson 6: Fine-Tuning & GenAI Integration Project

Focus:

Concept-level LoRA / QLoRA

When to fine-tune vs prompt

Lightweight adaptation methods

Mini project: Build a small RAG or GenAI system

Documentation & evaluation

Outcome: Students build their first structured GenAI system.

Week 5 Final Outcome

By the end of Week 5, students can:

✔ Explain how NLP systems process text

✔ Understand Transformer & LLM architecture

✔ Use Hugging Face models properly

✔ Design effective prompts

✔ Evaluate LLM outputs responsibly

✔ Build basic RAG systems

✔ Understand fine-tuning concepts

✔ Engineer structured GenAI workflows

Week 5 produces:

LLM-capable AI engineers. responsibly.