Glossary · F
Terms starting with F
6 of 250 glossary terms. Each entry links to its own page with why it matters and where it fits.
Definitions here are written for engineers, not grammarians: what the term means, why it matters when it comes up, and where it sits in the curriculum — most term pages name the lessons that lean on the concept, so you can jump from a definition straight to the teaching. Use the letter bar below to move through the alphabet, or press the slash key to search the whole corpus directly.
Every entry carries three things besides the definition: the plain aliases it travels under (listed as “also”), a category tag for which stretch of the curriculum it belongs to, and the cross-references that place it next to its neighbors — the terms you would meet in the same lesson. A term earns a page here only when a lesson in the curriculum actually uses it, so the corpus stays the shape of the material instead of the shape of a dictionary.
One honest way to use this page: read down the list of entries below and note every term you could not define in a sentence if a colleague asked. That list — not the whole letter — is your revision list, and each entry links to the reading that closes the gap.
Feature
Data & representations
An individual measurable property of the data. In classical ML, you engineer features by hand. In deep learning, the network learns features automatically from raw data.
Few-Shot
Prompting & context
In-context learning that includes a small set of demonstrations before the target input so the model can infer the desired task, format, or decision boundary.
Fine-tuning
Math & training
Continuing training from pretrained parameters on a narrower dataset or objective. Depending on the method, you may update all parameters, selected parameters, or added adapter parameters.
Flaky Test
AI-native development
A test that can pass and fail across equivalent runs without a relevant change to the code or intended test environment.
FlashAttention
Infrastructure & serving
An exact attention algorithm that tiles the computation to reduce transfers between accelerator memory levels while avoiding materialization of the full attention matrix in high-bandwidth memory.
Function Calling
Agents & tools
A provider or application interface through which a model emits a structured request naming a tool and its arguments. Application code validates the request, performs the operation, and can return the result for another model step.