A 9-Paper Reading Path to Understand How Modern LLMs Are Pretrained, Finetuned and Aligned
cneuralnetwork · x · 2026-10-28
AI educator cneuralnetwork shared a 9-paper reading list for people who want to learn how LLMs work, in recommended order:
- Attention Is All You Need (Transformer foundation)
- BERT
- GPT-2
- GPT-3
- Chinchilla (scaling laws)
- InstructGPT (RLHF alignment)
- LoRA (efficient finetuning)
- LLaMA
- FlashAttention (inference optimization)
According to the author, working through these in order covers most of the core ideas behind how modern LLMs are pretrained, finetuned, and aligned.
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