ADVANCED LEVEL - STEP 2

Mastering Advanced Techniques and Models

Focus on cutting-edge models and techniques within your chosen specialization. Learn state-of-the-art architectures, optimization methods, and advanced training strategies.

Progress: Step 2 of 610-15 hours estimated

Learning Objectives

  • Implement and understand state-of-the-art model architectures
  • Master advanced training techniques for improved performance
  • Optimize models for production deployment and efficiency
  • Apply transfer learning and fine-tuning strategies effectively

🎯 Core Advanced Techniques

🏗️

State-of-the-Art Model Architectures

Master the latest breakthrough architectures that are pushing the boundaries of AI performance.

Key Topics:

  • Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Hybrid Architectures
  • Efficient Transformer Variants (MobileBERT, DistilBERT)
  • Neural Architecture Search (NAS)

🚀 Practical Exercise

Implement a Vision Transformer from Scratch

Advanced6-8 hours

Advanced Training Techniques

Learn cutting-edge training strategies that improve model performance and efficiency.

Key Topics:

  • Gradient Accumulation and Mixed Precision Training
  • Learning Rate Scheduling and Warm-up Strategies
  • Regularization Techniques (Dropout, DropConnect)

🚀 Practical Exercise

Optimize Training Pipeline Performance

Intermediate4-6 hours
🚀

Model Optimization and Efficiency

Optimize models for production deployment with minimal performance loss.

Key Topics:

  • Model Compression and Pruning Strategies
  • Quantization (INT8, INT4) and Calibration
  • Knowledge Distillation and Teacher-Student Models

🚀 Practical Exercise

Deploy Optimized Model to Mobile

Advanced8-10 hours
🔄

Transfer Learning and Fine-tuning

Master advanced transfer learning techniques for rapid adaptation to new domains.

Key Topics:

  • Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Learning
  • Domain Adaptation and Domain Generalization
  • Meta-Learning and Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML)

🚀 Practical Exercise

Build a Few-Shot Learning System

Advanced6-8 hours
🏗️

State-of-the-Art Model Architectures

Master the latest breakthrough architectures that are pushing the boundaries of AI performance.

🎯 Key Topics

  • Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Hybrid Architectures
  • Efficient Transformer Variants (MobileBERT, DistilBERT)
  • Neural Architecture Search (NAS)
  • Mixture of Experts (MoE) Models
  • Graph Neural Networks (GNNs)
  • Multimodal Architectures (CLIP, DALL-E 2)

🛠️ Implementation Techniques

  • Self-attention mechanisms and positional encoding
  • Layer normalization and residual connections
  • Depthwise separable convolutions
  • Knowledge distillation for model compression
  • Pruning and quantization techniques
  • Cross-modal attention and fusion

🚀 Hands-On Exercise

Implement a Vision Transformer from Scratch

Build and train a ViT model for image classification, understanding every component.

Advanced⏱️ 6-8 hours
Learning Outcomes:
  • • Deep understanding of implementation details
  • • Hands-on experience with cutting-edge techniques
  • • Portfolio-ready project implementation

Advanced Training Techniques

Learn cutting-edge training strategies that improve model performance and efficiency.

🎯 Key Topics

  • Gradient Accumulation and Mixed Precision Training
  • Learning Rate Scheduling and Warm-up Strategies
  • Regularization Techniques (Dropout, DropConnect)
  • Data Augmentation and Synthetic Data Generation
  • Curriculum Learning and Progressive Training
  • Adversarial Training and Robustness

🛠️ Implementation Techniques

  • Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP) with FP16
  • Cosine annealing and cyclic learning rates
  • Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA)
  • Label smoothing and mixup augmentation
  • Progressive resizing and test-time augmentation
  • Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) for adversarial examples

🚀 Hands-On Exercise

Optimize Training Pipeline Performance

Implement advanced training techniques to achieve 2x speedup with maintained accuracy.

Intermediate⏱️ 4-6 hours
Learning Outcomes:
  • • Deep understanding of implementation details
  • • Hands-on experience with cutting-edge techniques
  • • Portfolio-ready project implementation
🚀

Model Optimization and Efficiency

Optimize models for production deployment with minimal performance loss.

🎯 Key Topics

  • Model Compression and Pruning Strategies
  • Quantization (INT8, INT4) and Calibration
  • Knowledge Distillation and Teacher-Student Models
  • Neural Architecture Search for Efficiency
  • Hardware-Aware Optimization
  • Edge Deployment and Mobile Optimization

🛠️ Implementation Techniques

  • Structured and unstructured pruning
  • Post-training and quantization-aware training
  • Progressive knowledge distillation
  • ONNX optimization and TensorRT acceleration
  • Model parallelism and pipeline parallelism
  • Core ML and TensorFlow Lite conversion

🚀 Hands-On Exercise

Deploy Optimized Model to Mobile

Compress a large model by 10x and deploy it to run efficiently on mobile devices.

Advanced⏱️ 8-10 hours
Learning Outcomes:
  • • Deep understanding of implementation details
  • • Hands-on experience with cutting-edge techniques
  • • Portfolio-ready project implementation
🔄

Transfer Learning and Fine-tuning

Master advanced transfer learning techniques for rapid adaptation to new domains.

🎯 Key Topics

  • Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Learning
  • Domain Adaptation and Domain Generalization
  • Meta-Learning and Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML)
  • Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (LoRA, Adapters)
  • Continual Learning and Catastrophic Forgetting
  • Cross-lingual and Cross-modal Transfer

🛠️ Implementation Techniques

  • Prototypical networks and matching networks
  • Adversarial domain adaptation
  • Gradient-based meta-learning algorithms
  • Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and prefix tuning
  • Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC)
  • Multilingual BERT and cross-lingual embeddings

🚀 Hands-On Exercise

Build a Few-Shot Learning System

Create a system that can learn new classes with just 5 examples per class.

Advanced⏱️ 6-8 hours
Learning Outcomes:
  • • Deep understanding of implementation details
  • • Hands-on experience with cutting-edge techniques
  • • Portfolio-ready project implementation

🏆 Master-Level Projects

Challenge yourself with these comprehensive projects that combine multiple advanced techniques.

Multi-Modal AI Assistant

Build an AI system that can understand and generate text, images, and audio simultaneously.

Technologies:

CLIPGPT-4VWhisperDALL-E

Key Skills:

Multimodal fusionAPI integrationReal-time processing
Expert📅 3-4 weeks

Efficient Edge AI Pipeline

Create a complete pipeline for deploying optimized models to edge devices with real-time inference.

Technologies:

TensorRTONNXTensorFlow LiteOpenVINO

Key Skills:

Model optimizationHardware accelerationDeployment
Advanced📅 2-3 weeks

Self-Supervised Learning Framework

Implement a framework for learning representations from unlabeled data using contrastive learning.

Technologies:

SimCLRBYOLSwAVPyTorch

Key Skills:

Self-supervisionContrastive learningRepresentation learning
Expert📅 4-5 weeks

📚 Advanced Learning Resources

Research Papers

  • • "Attention Is All You Need" (Transformer)
  • • "An Image is Worth 16x16 Words" (ViT)
  • • "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers"
  • • "LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models"
  • • "Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation"

Implementation Guides

  • • Hugging Face Transformers Documentation
  • • PyTorch Lightning Advanced Tutorials
  • • TensorFlow Model Optimization Toolkit
  • • NVIDIA TensorRT Developer Guide
  • • Papers with Code Implementation Reviews

Tools & Frameworks

  • • Weights & Biases for experiment tracking
  • • Optuna for hyperparameter optimization
  • • Ray Tune for distributed training
  • • DeepSpeed for large model training
  • • Triton for custom GPU kernels

🎯 Mastery Assessment

Technical Competencies

Implement a Vision Transformer from scratch
Optimize model training with mixed precision
Compress model size by 10x with minimal accuracy loss
Implement few-shot learning with meta-learning

Project Deliverables

Complete at least 2 hands-on exercises
Build one master-level project
Document implementation details and learnings
Share results with the AI community