CS 639: Foundation Models

Spring 2026 · UW–Madison

Notes on how large pretrained models are built, scaled, and adapted to new tasks.

Topics

• Transformers and attention
• Pretraining, scaling, and multimodal models
• Prompting and adaptation

Notes

• All lectures
• Midterm
• Homework 1
• Homework 2
• Homework 3
• Homework 4
• Homework 5
• Final project: specification and rubric
• Course details and policies

Resources

• Course site
• The Illustrated Transformer