Domain: Foundations & Theory

127 terms

A/B Testing Intermediate

Controlled experiment comparing variants by random assignment to estimate causal effects of changes.

Accuracy Intermediate

Fraction of correct predictions; can be misleading on imbalanced datasets.

Activation Function Intermediate

Nonlinear functions enabling networks to approximate complex mappings; ReLU variants dominate modern DL.

Active Learning Intermediate

Selecting the most informative samples to label (e.g., uncertainty sampling) to reduce labeling cost.

Adaptive Optimization Intermediate

Methods like Adam adjusting learning rates dynamically.

Adversarial Example Intermediate

Inputs crafted to cause model errors or unsafe behavior, often imperceptible in vision or subtle in text.

Alignment Intermediate

Ensuring model behavior matches human goals, norms, and constraints, including reducing harmful or deceptive outputs.

Artificial Intelligence Intermediate

The field of building systems that perform tasks associated with human intelligence—perception, reasoning, language, planning, and decision-making—via algori...

AUC Intermediate

Scalar summary of ROC; measures ranking ability, not calibration.

Automation Bias Intermediate

Tendency to trust automated suggestions even when incorrect; mitigated by UI design, training, and checks.

Autoregressive Model Intermediate

Generates sequences one token at a time, conditioning on past tokens.

Backdoor / Trojan Intermediate

Hidden behavior activated by specific triggers, causing targeted mispredictions or undesired outputs.

Batch Size Intermediate

Number of samples per gradient update; impacts compute efficiency, generalization, and stability.

Beam Search Intermediate

Search algorithm for generation that keeps top-k partial sequences; can improve likelihood but reduce diversity.

Bias Intermediate

Systematic differences in model outcomes across groups; arises from data, labels, and deployment context.

Bias–Variance Tradeoff Intermediate

A conceptual framework describing error as the sum of systematic error (bias) and sensitivity to data (variance).

Calibration Intermediate

The degree to which predicted probabilities match true frequencies (e.g., 0.8 means ~80% correct).

Causal Inference Intermediate

Framework for reasoning about cause-effect relationships beyond correlation, often using structural assumptions and experiments.

Chain-of-Thought Intermediate

Stepwise reasoning patterns that can improve multi-step tasks; often handled implicitly or summarized for safety/privacy.

Chunking Intermediate

Breaking documents into pieces for retrieval; chunk size/overlap strongly affect RAG quality.

Compute Intermediate

Hardware resources used for training/inference; constrained by memory bandwidth, FLOPs, and parallelism.

Concept Drift Intermediate

The relationship between inputs and outputs changes over time, requiring monitoring and model updates.

Confounding Intermediate

A hidden variable influences both cause and effect, biasing naive estimates of causal impact.

Confusion Matrix Intermediate

A table summarizing classification outcomes, foundational for metrics like precision, recall, specificity.

Constrained Optimization Intermediate

Optimization under equality/inequality constraints.

Control Theory Intermediate

Mathematical framework for controlling dynamic systems.

Controller Intermediate

Algorithm computing control actions.

Cross-Validation Intermediate

A robust evaluation technique that trains/evaluates across multiple splits to estimate performance variability.

Curriculum Learning Intermediate

Ordering training samples from easier to harder to improve convergence or generalization.

Data Augmentation Intermediate

Expanding training data via transformations (flips, noise, paraphrases) to improve robustness.