A small, evolving reference for terms that show up repeatedly across the blog. Inline glossary terms open a compact definition card, while each term here has its own entry page for longer notes and future expansion.
Glossary
Active Learning
A training approach where the system selectively chooses which examples should be labeled next.
Glossary
Attention
A neural mechanism that lets a model weigh which parts of the input matter most when processing or predicting.
Glossary
Autoencoder
A model that learns a compressed representation of its input and then tries to reconstruct the original input from it.
Glossary
Collaborative Filtering
A recommendation approach that predicts preferences from patterns in many users' interactions rather than item content alone.
Glossary
Corpus
A structured collection of text or other examples that you analyze, search, or use to train and evaluate a model.
Glossary
Cosine Similarity
A measure of how aligned two vectors are, commonly used to compare embeddings by direction rather than raw magnitude.
Glossary
Embedding
A dense numeric representation that places similar items close together in vector space.
Glossary
Fine-Tuning
The process of continuing training on a pre-trained model so it becomes better suited to a narrower task or domain.
Glossary
Inference
The stage where a trained model is used to make predictions or generate outputs on new inputs.
Glossary
Large Language Model
A very large language model, usually transformer-based, trained on broad text data and adapted for many downstream tasks.
Glossary
Learning Rate
A training hyperparameter that controls how large each parameter update is during optimization.
Glossary
Natural Language Processing
A field focused on helping computers interpret, transform, and generate human language.
Glossary
Overfitting
A failure mode where a model matches the training data too closely and performs worse on new, unseen examples.
Glossary
Pre-Training
The initial large-scale training phase that teaches a model general patterns before narrower task-specific adaptation.
Glossary
Prompt
The input text or instructions given to a generative model to shape the response it produces.
Glossary
Prompt Engineering
The practice of designing prompts so a model is more likely to produce the kind of output you want.
Glossary
Regularization
Techniques that limit model complexity or penalize certain behaviors so the model generalizes better to new data.
Glossary
Reinforcement Learning
A family of methods where an agent learns by taking actions, receiving rewards, and improving behavior over time.
Glossary
Semantic Search
Search that tries to match by meaning and intent instead of only exact keyword overlap.
Glossary
Token
The basic unit a language model reads and predicts, which may be a word, character, or subword fragment.
Glossary
Transfer Learning
Reusing knowledge learned on one task or dataset to help solve a different but related task more efficiently.
Glossary
Transformer
A neural network architecture built around attention mechanisms that became the foundation for many modern language models.