CS 6966/5966, Spring 2026, Kahlert School of Computing, University of Utah

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 10:45am–12:05pm, WEB L112

Instructor: **Ana Marasović** (she/her), Office Hours: TBD

Links: Canvas (TBD); Piazza (TBD); Gradescope (TBD)

These can be accessed with your university accounts.

Course evaluation

• 30% three in-person quizzes
• 70% serious (🙂) project [many components: framing activity + proposal, intermediate report + peer feedback activity + changes report, poster preparation + presentation + participation]

Schedule

I'm not assigning lectures to specific dates at the beginning of the semester. Topics I plan to cover are below this schedule.

Untitled

Planned course topics

Intro

• Course overview + Logistics
• Background (only 1 lecture): Transformer architecture, LLMs

Mechanistic interpretability: Early circuits

• Residual stream, QK / OV circuits
• Activation patching & causal intervention (the core technique)