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AI360Xpert

Ai Research Engineer

A comprehensive guide for Ai Research Engineer

""1PREREQUISITES: MATHEMATICS & COMPUTER SCIENCE FOUNDATIONS2CORE MACHINE LEARNING & THEORY3DEEP LEARNING FOUNDATIONS4ADVANCED AI TOPICS & CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH5AI ENGINEERING & INFRASTRUCTURE6THE RESEARCH LIFECYCLEAi Research EngineerLinear AlgebraVectors, Matrices,Tensors, and VectorSpacesEigenvalues,Eigenvectors, andMatrix DecompositionsSVDPCACholeskyMatrix Calculus andDifferentiatingthrough Linear AlgebraOperationsCalculus & OptimizationMultivariate CalculusPartial DerivativesGradientsJacobiansHessiansGradient Descent andits VariantsSGDMomentumAdamAdamWSophiaConstrainedOptimization, LagrangeMultipliers, andConvex OptimizationProbability & StatisticsProbabilityDistributions, Bayes'Theorem, Expectations,and MomentsStatisticalSignificance,Hypothesis Testing,and Maximum LikelihoodEstimationMLEInformation TheoryEntropyCross-EntropyKL DivergenceMutual InformationComputer Science FundamentalsData Structures andAlgorithmsTreesGraphsDynamic ProgrammingComputationalComplexity and Big ONotationParallel Computing,Concurrency, andDistributed SystemsBasicsSupervised & Unsupervised LearningLinear & LogisticRegression, SupportVector MachinesSVMsEnsemble MethodsRandom ForestsGradient Boosting -XGBoostLightGBMClustering (K-Means,DBSCAN) andDimensionalityReductionPCAt-SNEUMAPTheoretical Machine LearningPAC Learning, VCDimension, andStatistical LearningTheoryBias-VarianceTradeoff,Generalization Bounds,and OverfittingEmpirical RiskMinimization andRegularizationStrategiesNeural Networks BasicsPerceptrons, MLPs, andModern ActivationFunctionsGELUSwishSiLUForward Propagation,Backpropagation, andComputational GraphsInitializationStrategies andNormalization LayersBatchLayerGroupRMSNormDeep Learning TheoryThe Neural TangentKernel (NTK) andInfinite-WidthNetworksGrokking, DoubleDescent, and theLottery TicketHypothesisOptimizationLandscapes and LossSurface GeometryComputer Vision (CV)Convolutional NeuralNetworks (CNNs) andModern ArchitecturesResNetConvNeXtObject Detection,Segmentation, andDense Prediction Tasks3D Vision, NeuralRadiance Fields(NeRFs), and 3DGaussian SplattingNatural Language Processing (NLP)Tokenization, SubwordAlgorithms (BPE,WordPiece), andVocabulary DesignWord Embeddings, RNNs,and the Transition toAttentionThe TransformerArchitectureSelf-AttentionPositional EncodingsKV CacheGraph and Geometric Deep LearningGraph ConvolutionalNetworks (GCNs) andMessage PassingGraph AttentionNetworks (GATs) andTransformers on GraphsEquivariant NeuralNetworks andPhysics-Informed MLData Curation and Synthetic DataPre-training DataPipelinesWeb CrawlingDeduplicationQuality FilteringPII RemovalSynthetic DataGeneration andSelf-PlaySelf-InstructRejection SamplingData Contamination,Leakage Detection, andDe-duplication againstBenchmarksLarge Language Models (LLMs)Pre-trainingObjectives, ScalingLaws, andCompute-OptimalTrainingChinchillaFine-tuning (SFT),Instruction Tuning,and Prompt EngineeringIn-Context Learning,Chain of Thought(CoT), and ReasoningCapabilitiesAgents, Retrieval, and Tool UseVector Databases,Embeddings, andAdvanced RAGChunkingRe-rankingTool Calling, FunctionCalling, and APIIntegrationAgentic Workflows(ReAct, Reflection,Planning) andMulti-Agent SystemsReinforcement Learning (RL)Markov DecisionProcesses (MDPs),Q-Learning, and PolicyGradientsDeep ReinforcementLearningDQNPPOSACOffline RL,Multi-Agent RL, andHierarchical RLAlignment and Post-TrainingReinforcement Learningfrom Human Feedback(RLHF) and RLAIFDirect PreferenceOptimization (DPO,KTO) and RewardModelingAI Safety, MechanisticInterpretability, andRed TeamingGenerative ModelsVariationalAutoencoders (VAEs)and GenerativeAdversarial NetworksGANsDiffusion ModelsDDPMsSDE-based formulationsLatent DiffusionFlow Matching,Continuous NormalizingFlows, andAutoregressiveGenerationSelf-Supervised and Multimodal LearningContrastive Learning(SimCLR, CLIP) andMasked ModelingMAEVision-Language Models(VLMs) and Cross-ModalAttentionAny-to-AnyMultimodalityAudioVideoTextImage FusionEmerging Architectures and MethodsState Space Models(Mamba, Jamba) andLinear RNNsMixture of Experts(MoE) and RoutingAlgorithmsTest-Time Compute(System 2 Thinking,Search) and ProcessReward ModelsPRMsRigorous Evaluation and BenchmarkingStatic Benchmarks(MMLU, GSM8K,SWE-bench) and theirLimitationsAutomated Evaluationand LLM-as-a-JudgeLMSYS Chatbot ArenaEvaluating Open-EndedGeneration, Tool Use,and Long-ContextCapabilitiesDeep Learning FrameworksPyTorch MasteryAutogradCustom `nn.Module`s`torch.compile`HooksJAX EcosystemFunctional MLvmappmapjitFlax/HaikuDistributed Training and High-Performance ComputingData Parallelism(FSDP) and ModelParallelismTensor/Pipeline/SequenceParallelismGPU/TPU Architecture,CUDA/C++ Basics, andCustom Triton KernelsLarge-ScaleInfrastructureMegatron-LMDeepSpeedSlurmMemory Optimization and Efficient InferenceParameter-EfficientFine-TuningLoRAQLoRAAdaptersMemory OptimizationsMixed PrecisionZeROActivationCheckpointingEfficient InferenceFlashAttentionPagedAttentionContinuous BatchingvLLMModel CompressionQuantization - AWQGPTQPruningKnowledge DistillationMLOps and Experiment TrackingExperiment TrackingWeights & BiasesMLflowTensorBoardModel Versioning,Artifact Management,and CheckpointingCI/CD for MachineLearning andContinuous TrainingPipelinesReading, Analyzing, and Synthesizing PapersLiterature ReviewMethodologies andKeeping up with arXivReproducing Resultsand ImplementingPapers from ScratchCritical Analysis,Identifying Gaps, andFormulating NovelHypothesesDesigning Experiments and PrototypingManaging ComputeBudgets and DesigningScaling ExperimentsAblation Studies,Empirical Rigor, andStatisticalSignificance ofResultsRapid Prototyping,Iterative Debugging,and Managing TechnicalDebtScientific Communication and Open SourceWriting ConferencePapersNeurIPSICLRICML FormattingGuidelinesCreating EffectiveVisualizations andCommunicating ComplexIdeasOpen Sourcing Code,Releasing Models(Hugging Face), andDissemination