# CS 639: Foundation Models

Source: https://wisconsin.twango.dev/sp26-cs639/README

# 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

- [[sp26-cs639/lectures/index|All lectures]]
- [[exams/midterm/index|Midterm]]
- [[hw1/README|Homework 1]]
- [[hw2/README|Homework 2]]
- [[hw3/README|Homework 3]]
- [[hw4/README|Homework 4]]
- [[hw5/README|Homework 5]]
- [[sp26-cs639/project/README|Final project: specification and rubric]]
- [[course-details|Course details and policies]]

## Resources

- [Course site](https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~fredsala/cs639/)
- [The Illustrated Transformer](https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/)