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AI / LLM Basics Interview Questions

What is a Decoder-Only model?

A Decoder-only model is a Transformer variant built entirely from decoder blocks, generating text one token at a time based only on the tokens that came before it.

  • Uses causal masking so each token can only attend to earlier tokens, never later ones
  • Well suited to open-ended text generation, since that's exactly the pattern it was trained on
  • Is the architecture behind most modern general-purpose LLMs, including GPT-style models

This architecture's straightforward "predict the next token" design is a big part of why it scales so well and has become the dominant approach for large-scale language models.

What technique does a decoder-only model use to restrict attention?
What is decoder-only architecture especially well suited to?

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What is a Large Language Model (LLM)? What are Tokens in an LLM? What is Tokenization? What is Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE)? What is the Vocabulary of an LLM? What is an Embedding in the context of LLMs? Define the Transformer architecture? What is the Attention Mechanism? What is Self-Attention? What is Multi-Head Attention? What is Positional Encoding? What is the purpose of the Feed-Forward Network inside a Transformer block? What is Layer Normalization? What is Causal Masking? Describe the role of Softmax in an LLM's output layer? What is Cross-Entropy Loss? What is the purpose of a Loss Function during LLM training? What is Pretraining in the context of LLMs? What is Fine-Tuning? What is Instruction Tuning? Describe Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)? What is Alignment in the context of LLMs? Define In-Context Learning? Define Zero-Shot Learning? Define Few-Shot Learning? What is Chain-of-Thought Prompting? What is Prompt Engineering? What is the purpose of a System Prompt? What is a Context Window? What is the Max Tokens parameter? What are Stop Sequences? What is Temperature in LLM sampling? What are Top-k and Top-p Sampling? What is Hallucination in LLMs? What is Perplexity in language modeling? What is Overfitting in the context of training an LLM? What are Parameters in an LLM? What is Quantization? What is Model Distillation? What is a Foundation Model? What is a Decoder-Only model? What is an Encoder-Only model? What is an Encoder-Decoder model? What is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture? What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)? How are Embeddings used beyond text generation? What are Guardrails in LLM applications? What is Prompt Injection?
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