A 277-page free LLM textbook: Foundations of Large Language Models, now at v4
mdancho84 · x · 2026-11-04
- Foundations of Large Language Models (arXiv:2501.09223) by Tong Xiao and Jingbo Zhu (Northeastern University NLP Lab & NiuTrans) is a 277-page free textbook, updated to v4 in Oct 2026.
- Six chapters: pre-training, generative models (scaling laws, long sequences), prompting (CoT, RAG, automatic prompt design), alignment (instruction tuning, RLHF, DPO), inference (decoding, acceleration, inference-time scaling), and reasoning.
- Aimed at students and NLP practitioners; free PDF on arXiv, with companion material on GitHub (NiuTrans/NLPBook).
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