Unit 4: Alignment and current research

Published

April 27, 2026

In this unit, you will learn more about the alignment stage of LLM training. You will also see some examples of current research in this and related areas. The unit features both lecture-style reviews of recent developments and videos from research presentations.

Lectures

The lectures start by exploring LLMs alignment. You will then learn about retrieval-augmented generation and current research on how LLMs store facts, and how tokenisation relates to LLM privacy and security. The series concludes by looking at the environmental cost of chatbot technology.

Section Title Video Slides
4.1 Reinforcement learning with human feedback video slides
4.2 Direct preference optimisation video slides
4.3 Retrieval-augmented generation video none
4.4 LLMs for fact completion video slides
4.5 Adversarial tokenization video slides
4.6 Environmental cost of chatbot technology video slides

Additional materials

Assignment

Link to the assignmnent