11. Practice & Resources

Miscellaneous Topics

Capstone Project Ideas

• Image Generator — Train a DCGAN or diffusion model on a custom dataset of 1000+ images
• Chatbot Fine-tuning — Fine-tune Llama 2/3 on a custom dataset using LoRA
• Text-to-Image Pipeline — Build a Streamlit app around Stable Diffusion with prompt engineering features
• Music Generation — Implement a simple RNN or transformer for MIDI music generation

Quiz Questions

1. What is the difference between a generative and discriminative model?
2. Explain the GAN training objective (minimax game).
3. How does the attention mechanism compute relationships between tokens?
4. What problem does KL divergence solve in VAEs?
5. Describe the three stages of RLHF.
6. What is mode collapse in GANs and how can it be mitigated?
7. Compare autoregressive models with diffusion models for image generation.
8. What is the purpose of positional encoding in transformers?

Ethics & Limitations

• Misinformation — Generative AI can create convincing fake content (deepfakes, fake news)
• Copyright — Legal questions around training data and generated outputs
• Environmental Impact — Training large models consumes significant energy
• Job Displacement — Automation of creative and knowledge work raises economic concerns
• Bias Amplification — Models may reinforce stereotypes present in training data

Future Trends

• AI Agents — Autonomous systems that plan, use tools, and complete complex tasks
• Real-Time Generation — Instant video/audio generation for live applications
• Smaller, Efficient Models — Distillation and quantization for edge deployment
• Multimodal Understanding — Seamless cross-modal generation and reasoning
• Personalized AI — Models that learn and adapt to individual users

Study Plan (8 Weeks)

• Weeks 1-2: Foundations — probability, ML basics, types of generative models
• Weeks 3-4: GANs and VAEs — theory, implementation, experimentation
• Weeks 5-6: Transformers and diffusion models — attention, GPT, Stable Diffusion
• Weeks 7-8: Applications, fine-tuning, ethics, capstone project

Certification Recommendations

• DeepLearning.AI Generative AI with LLMs — Coursera
• Hugging Face NLP Course — Free, practical
• Google Cloud Generative AI — Vertex AI
• Fast.ai Practical Deep Learning — Free, hands-on