Degree Level · IIT Madras BS

Mathematical Foundations of Generative AI

Three exam-targeted study guides covering the full twelve weeks, built from the lecture notes, the instructor's handwritten note sets, the official practice papers, and every past-term quiz and end-term paper with its answer key. Each guide walks the full narrative, then drills the exact question templates that keep coming back.

Quiz 1Weeks 1–4

Adversarial models

The mathematics of GANs — from f-divergences and variational bounds, through Wasserstein GANs and inversion, to FID. One tightly-scoped story, told end to end.

f-divergenceVariational boundGAN & optimal D*WGANBiGANDomain adaptationFID
14 sections · 50 marks · ~21 questions/paper Open guide
Quiz 2Weeks 5–8

Latent-variable & diffusion models

One inequality — the ELBO — and its three descendants: EM for mixtures, the VAE with a single learned latent, and the DDPM with a thousand fixed ones.

GMM & EMELBOVAEReparameterizationβ-VAEVQ-VAEDDPMGuidance
19 sections · 40–50 marks · ~16 questions/paper Open guide
End TermWeeks 9–12

Sequences & alignment

Diffusion finished properly — score, guidance, DDIM — then the change of subject: autoregressive transformers, and the reinforcement learning that makes them behave.

Score & CFGDDIMAttentionCausal maskingLayerNorm & PEPolicy gradientPPORLHF & DPOSSM
23 sections · 50 marks · 16–22 questions/paper Open guide
Weighted by what's askedTopic-frequency charts tallied from every past paper, so revision time goes where the marks are.
Real questions, real keysEvery example question is reproduced from a past or practice paper with its official answer, worked step by step.
Derivations, not just resultsStep-by-step proof timelines that explain why each move is legal — which is what kills the distractors.
Built for the last hourA formula cheat sheet and a night-before recall checklist at the end of each guide.
Tip. Click any answer option to check it instantly, and use ★ High-yield callouts as your drill deck. All three guides work offline once loaded, respond to your system's dark/light setting, and have a theme toggle in the sidebar.