Free 277-page LLM textbook Foundations of Large Language Models updated with a new chapter
mdancho84 · x · 2026-09-26
The open textbook Foundations of Large Language Models by Tong Xiao and Jingbo Zhu (arXiv:2501.09223) has been updated to v3 with a new chapter, available as a free 277-page PDF.
The book focuses on foundational concepts rather than exhaustive coverage of cutting-edge techniques, organized into six chapters:
- Pre-training
- Generative models
- Prompting: including chain-of-thought reasoning and automatic prompt design
- Alignment: instruction fine-tuning and human-feedback-based alignment
- Inference: decoding algorithms, acceleration methods, and inference-time scaling
- Reasoning
Aimed at students and practitioners in NLP and related fields, it serves as a free, systematic introduction and reference for LLMs.
Related event: 277-Page Open Textbook Foundations of LLMs Gets New Chapter(2 posts)→
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