| Part I — Introduction to LLMs and agents |
| 1 |
2026-09-02 |
Juncheng Yang |
Course overview and logistics [slide] |
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Assignment 1 out (Mads-Lens: Watch the
agent work); Sign up for AWS |
| 2 |
2026-09-07 |
No class — Labor Day |
| 2 |
2026-09-09 |
Juncheng Yang |
Agents use I: How Claude Code Works [slide] |
How I use LLMs; Best practices for Claude Code; Agentic Engineering Patterns; more reading →
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| 3 |
2026-09-14 |
Juncheng Yang |
Agents use II: 100x Engineer with Multi-agents [slide] |
Claude Code agent teams; Software is changing (again); Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI; more reading →
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| 3 |
2026-09-16 |
Juncheng Yang |
Agents design I: context management and tool design [slide]
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ReAct; A practical guide to building agents; LLM Powered Autonomous Agents; more reading →
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Assignment 1 due Sun Sep 20, 11:59pm |
| 4 |
2026-09-21 |
Students |
Student sharing I |
What you learned from using an agent (Assignment 1): surprises, failures, lessons, insights, new
tools/skills/plugins |
Assignment 2 out (Mads-Loop: Build
the loop) |
| 4 |
2026-09-23 |
Juncheng Yang |
Agents design II: multi-agent architecture, coordination, and communication [slide] |
multi-agent research system; scaling agent systems; don’t build multi-agents; more reading →
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| 5 |
2026-09-28 |
Juncheng Yang |
Agents design III: agent memory and reliability [slide] |
where agents fail; MemGPT; more reading →
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| 5 |
2026-09-30 |
Juncheng Yang |
Agent design IV: agent evaluation [slide] |
Agent evaluation and benchmarks |
Assignment 2 due Sun Oct 4, 11:59pm
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| 6 |
2026-10-05 |
Harsh Nilesh Pathak (Snowflake) |
Guest lecture: Developing and Evaluating Agents in Enterprise Setting |
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Assignment 3 out (Mads-Opt: Make
every token count) |
| 6 |
2026-10-07 |
Juncheng Yang |
Advanced agent design I: Cost and performance [slide] [Assignment3 slide] |
Cost-effective agents |
Pre-proposal due (optional and only submit if you want to discuss your ideas) |
| 7 |
2026-10-12 |
No class — Indigenous Peoples’ Day |
| 7 |
2026-10-14 |
Students |
Advanced agent design II: agent safety, self-evolving harness |
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| Part II — Systems for LLMs and agents |
| 8 |
2026-10-19 |
Juncheng Yang |
Efficient LLM serving: basics I |
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Assignment 3 due Tue Oct 20,
11:59pm |
| 8 |
2026-10-21 |
Juncheng Yang |
Efficient LLM serving: basics II |
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Assignment 4 out (Mads-Serve: Own
the serving engine) |
| 9 |
2026-10-26 |
Juncheng Yang and Students |
Assignment Feedback and Student sharing II |
Common pitfalls in your submission; Assignment 3 lessons sharing. |
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| 9 |
2026-10-28 |
Juncheng Yang |
Efficient LLM serving: speculative decoding |
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Project proposal due |
| 10 |
2026-11-02 |
Juncheng Yang |
Efficient agentic systems: scheduling and prefix caching |
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This lecture is earlier because of Assignment 4. |
| 10 |
2026-11-04 |
Juncheng Yang |
Efficient LLM serving: pruning and quantization |
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| 11 |
2026-11-09 |
Xianzheng Kou (Meta) |
Guest lecture: Why Infrastructure sets the pace of AI |
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Assignment 4 due Tue Nov 10, 11:59pm |
| 11 |
2026-11-11 |
Juncheng Yang |
Efficient LLM serving: GPU and kernels |
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Assignment 5 out (Mads-Stack:
Optimize the full stack) |
| 12 |
2026-11-16 |
Students |
Efficient LLM serving: KV-cache optimization and model architectures |
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| 12 |
2026-11-18 |
Students |
Student sharing III |
Demonstrate your agent-engine co-design (Assignment 4) |
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| 13 |
2026-11-23 |
Juncheng Yang |
Efficient agentic system: routing and load balancing |
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Assignment 5 due Sun Nov 29, 11:59pm |
| 13 |
2026-11-25 |
No class — Thanksgiving recess |
| 14 |
2026-11-30 |
Juncheng Yang |
Efficient agentic systems: others |
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| 14 |
2026-12-02 |
Students |
Student sharing IV |
Showcase your full stack optimizations (Assignment 5) |
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| 14 |
2026-12-07 |
Students |
Final project poster and demo |
Present your final project as a poster and a live demo. Location: SEC 1.402 from
9:00 AM to 1:00 PM |
Final project due Tue Dec 8, 11:59pm
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