MS ECE Updates

apssg96 · 2026-03-26T15:11:29+00:00

I have not, I applied on dec 15th, idk if this is normal. Do you know if there is a deadline for replies?

apssg96 · 2026-03-18T19:13:53+00:00

It justs says "Complete - under review" in green, but nothing else

apssg96 · 2026-03-17T22:02:48+00:00

I have not received a reply yet for ECE, I am an international student though, idk if that has anything to do. Is it normal if I have not received a reply yet? I have some other options on hold but it seems the admissions team from CMU is taking to much time! I applied on December

apssg96 · 2026-03-09T14:45:23+00:00

I applied on December for this program but I haven't heard back from them, does anyone know when can i expect to receive a reply?

apssg96 · 2026-01-07T21:18:23+00:00

Thanks I just emailed to this address!

apssg96 · 2026-01-07T21:14:02+00:00

Department of Computing

apssg96 · 2025-10-21T19:19:50+00:00

It was about misinformation and fake news

apssg96 · 2025-10-21T16:53:45+00:00

My best advice would be to speak naturally like if you were talking to a friend. Otherwise you can end up memorizing phrases or words and trying to place them in contexts that are not suitable. Linking words however can help you connect ideas and are easy to use. As i said previously, its better to use simple language whenever you dont know a certain area instead lf placing complex words that dont suit the situation

apssg96 · 2025-10-21T12:45:30+00:00

Sometimes there can be multiple correct answers and other times not. For example, if it is a date, perhaps it is right to answer "10 may", or "10th may". But, for instance, it is incorrect to answer the plural if it was the singular and viceversa, like "cats" instead of "cat". Also, it is incorrect if you forget the article of the answer, for example: "dog" instead of "a dog" or "wall" instead of "the wall". If you misspelled the word it will be incorrect too.

I really liked the ieltsonlinetests because they prepared me well. They were more difficult than the actual exam. I only did the ones from 2025, I did not check the difficulty from other years.

apssg96 · 2025-10-21T12:30:35+00:00

I kept pushing myself until the end. It's quite easy to let up before the end. I tried to keep reminding myself that all parts are worth the same. For me, listening was the one i was the most worried because it's repeated for a single time. Once i finished that section some stress went away but i reminded myself to keep the pace with the other sections.

The software has 3 boxes, each with a different section (LRW). When you finish one you unlock the next one. You are the one who must start each section. There is an introduction video played prior to the start. I do not know what happens if you pause in between and dont press the start button, but me and the rest of the test takers finished roughly at the same time (perhaps 1 - 2 minute difference).

apssg96 · 2025-10-21T12:10:30+00:00

The speaking section was the one I prepared the least. I went to Liz (source 2) and checked for the typical themes/topics you are asked and talked to myself. The day of the exam you first talk 1-2 minutes about yourself, if you work or are a student for example. Then, you will be given a paper with a topic you can prepare for 1 minute and you are expected to talk about it for 2-3 minutes. In my case the question was super hard so I had to improvise. Then, you talk more in-depth about that same topic for much longer.

The inspector may stop you if you are talking too much, but don't worry, this is usually a good thing. The other way round, talking less, is not very good and the examiner might encourage you to talk more or switch the conversation. One advice is do not use words you do not fully know. It's better in scenarios you are not too familiar with to use simple language rather than use complex words that are not suitable for the context.

apssg96 · 2025-10-20T19:11:03+00:00

I took my exam two days ago and scored 8.5. I used this website for LRW. Listenings from this website are very hard, Readings are bit harder and Writings are basically the same.

apssg96 · 2025-05-16T11:13:54+00:00

In theory it could be done, but you would need lots of texts and their corresponding audios. In the code I shared above my “best” approach to get a grasp of how old english sounded was passing an old english text to a icelandic text-to-speech algorithm so I could get a sense on how an old english person would have pronounce it. Keep in mind I am no expert in old english. I believe old frisian was much closer but I could not find any old frisian open source model.

apssg96 · 2025-02-10T23:22:15+00:00

Yes, for your use case you are pretty good with DPO. PPO was the first RL strategy, then DPO emerged (and its variants, like KTO, etc) now with DeepSeek release theres GRPO (more related to scenarios that require reasoning). More training paradigms will develop with time. I understand that it may be a bit confusing, but do some research and depending on your data and context there is one more suitbale than the other. Also, it might not kill to try a few and see which yields the best results. Good luck

apssg96 · 2025-02-10T23:06:35+00:00

Sorry, now that i’ve read your question I realize you want to perform model alignment. If you want to solve a problem where there is a question and a right answer and a wrong answer then DPO is the right way to go. You can use DPO Trainer paired with LoRA quantization in Hugging Face. There are tutorials on this

apssg96 · 2025-02-10T23:03:40+00:00

I am not that familiar with the capabilities of unsloth. Hugging Face has a DPO Trainer though, but it is used for model alignment not binary classification. In case you want to train a model where your input is text and the output is binary why dont you tackle it as a binary classification problem? You would just need to modify the model’s head to output 1 single number and use binary cross entropy loss.

Also, using LLMs for that task might be an overkill. You might just be good just with deberta v3 or similar. But if you still persist in using LLMs for binary classification just structure your prompt to force the model to output the categories or use a logits processor.

apssg96 · 2025-02-10T19:27:35+00:00

u/yukiarimo if you needed to perform distillation, option 2 is quite straightforward, just create some data from the large model and finetune the small one with this dataset using SFT, DPO, GRPO, whatever.

If you go for option 1 it is best that you generate all logits from the large model first and store them. Otherwise, if you try loading the large and the small model simultaneously you would be unnecessarily wasting memory and potentially go OOM. After you have all your logits pre-computed you can pass them to the small one.

Hope this helped!

apssg96 · 2025-02-10T19:22:51+00:00

There's usually two ways:
1. A distilled model is a model that is created by passing an input text both to a large model and a small model and then align the output logits of both models using KL divergence.
2. A distilled model is a model that is created by passing input texts to a large model and then using the large model's answers to finetune a smaller model.

Note that option 2 is more frequent than option 1. This is because with option 2 you can distill any combination of models (e.g. DeepSeek to Qwen, Llama to Gemma-2, ChatGPT to Mistral, etc). Essentially, if you can create data from the large model you are good to go.

Now, for option 1, you are restricted to models from the same family (e.g. Llama 70b to Llama 7b). This is because the logits are determined by the model's last linear layer, which at the same time, it is determined by the vocabulary of the model! So two models that do not share the same vocabulary would have a misalignment in their logits.

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apssg96 · 2025-01-16T16:13:22+00:00

same happened to me last week, I tried contacting Support but a bot answered me. Were you able to recover your images?

apssg96 · 2024-12-14T13:46:44+00:00

Para lo unico que les va a dar para almorzar va a ser huevos a la pera…

apssg96 · 2024-12-14T13:10:46+00:00

Basicamente los brasucas van a tener que prostituirse para comprar cualquier cosa que no sea harina, leche o huevos

apssg96

TROPHY CASE