Why RAG Latency Is a Prefill Problem, Not a Retrieval Problem
Part 13: Why prefill dominates RAG latency, and how to reuse KV caches that share no prefix, with implementations
90 posts published
Part 13: Why prefill dominates RAG latency, and how to reuse KV caches that share no prefix, with implementations
RL Part 13: An exploration of real-world RL case studies.
RL Part 12: From a single judged group to a full multi-step training loop with ART and RULER.
RL Part 11: From verifiable rewards to LLM-as-a-judge.
RL Part 10: Dropping two models from the four-model pipeline, and building rewards you can trust.
Part 9: From human preferences to a trained reward signal, and the four-model PPO pipeline.
RL Part 8: Trust regions, the clipped surrogate, and the workhorse of modern RL.
RL Part 7: Learning the policy directly, from REINFORCE to actor-critic.
RL Part 6: From linear features to neural networks, and the engineering choices that makes deep value-based RL possible.
RL Part 5: From tables to parameterized value functions.
RL Part 4: Learning value functions and policies without a model. Monte Carlo methods, TD(0), SARSA, Q-learning, and the bias-variance bridge between them.
RL Part 3: Bellman expectation and optimality equations, policy iteration, value iteration, and why dynamic programming needs a model.
RL Part 2: Markov decision processes, returns, policies, and value functions.
RL Part 1: Agents, environments, rewards, and why RL is different from supervised learning.
Diffusion LLMs Part 2: How dLLMs scale to 100B parameters, the inference stack that makes them fast, hands-on code, and when to actually use them.
Diffusion LLMs Part 1: Understanding how diffusion language models work from first principles, the math behind masked diffusion, and why they represent a fundamentally different approach to text generation.
An exploration of real-world MLOps and LLMOps case studies, examining the importance of reliable ML and AI engineering and their significance for business outcomes.
LLMOps Part 14: An overview of the fundamentals of LLM serving, including API-based access, inference with vLLM, and practical decisions.
LLMOps Part 13: Exploring the mechanics of LLM inference, from prefill and decode phases to KV caching, batching, and optimization techniques that improve latency and throughput.
LLMOps Part 12: Understanding LLM fine-tuning, parameter-efficient methods like LoRA and QLoRA, and alignment techniques such as RLHF, DPO, and GRPO.
LLMOps Part 11: Understanding evaluation of conversational LLM systems, tool evaluations, tracing with Langfuse, and automated red teaming.
LLMOps Part 10: Understanding model benchmarks, LLM application evaluation, and tooling.
LLMOps Part 9: A foundational guide to the evaluation of LLM applications, covering challenges and a practical taxonomy of evaluation methods.
LLMOps Part 8: A concise overview of memory, dynamic and temporal context in LLM systems, covering short and long-term memory, dynamic context injection, and some of the common context failure modes in agentic applications.
LLMOps Part 7: A conceptual overview of context engineering, covering context types, context construction principles, and retrieval-centric techniques for building high-signal inputs.
LLMOps Part 6: Exploring prompt versioning, defensive prompting, and techniques such as verbalized sampling, role prompting and more.
LLMOps Part 5: An introduction to prompt engineering (a subset of context engineering), covering prompt types, the prompt development workflow, and key techniques in the field.
LLMOps Part 4: An exploration of key decoding strategies, sampling parameters, and the general lifecycle of LLM-based applications.
LLMOps Part 3: A focused look at the core ideas behind attention mechanism, transformer and mixture-of-experts architectures, and model pretraining and fine-tuning.
LLMOps Part 2: A detailed walkthrough of tokenization, embeddings, and positional representations, building the foundational translation layer that enables LLMs to process and reason over text.