1. Many engineers are not used to reading math-heavy research papers
2. The language of research papers is dense and requires strong foundations to understand
3. There is just too much research being published every day, and it’s tough to read it all

1.Math-heavy papers & what to do about them?

Check out a paragraph from the research paper titled ‘*Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training’,* which introduces the GPT architecture.

The paragraph describes the pretraining objective that is maximized during LLM training.

It looks intimidating, but it actually isn't. It is written this way because math is a great way to condense ideas and concepts and avoid verbosity.

To make it easy to understand, simply pass it to an LLM with a simple prompt as follows.

Image of the equation and the prompt passed to Claude

Image of the equation and the prompt passed to Claude

And this is what you get as a response.

Response from Claude

Response from Claude

You could also prompt an LLM further to explain a concept in more detail or, with step-by-step examples, if you’re still struggling to understand something

2.The One Approach that Works No matter What:

1. Top-down: Read an AI/ML research paper first and then learn the relevant math.

Research papers are deliberately written concisely, avoiding verbosity. Otherwise, a single one would have pages enough to fill an entire textbook.

Here’s an excerpt from ‘Attention is all you need’, the famous research paper that introduces the Transformer architecture.