Terms starting with I

10 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.

Idempotency
AI-native development
The property that repeating the same operation with the same identity does not create additional side effects beyond the first successful application.
Image Token
Multimodal systems
A model-specific visual unit represented as a vector or discrete code, commonly derived from an image patch, region, or learned visual-codebook entry.
In-Context Learning
Prompting & context
A model adapting its behavior from instructions, examples, or patterns supplied in the current input without an ordinary parameter update.
Incident Response
Reliability & operations
The coordinated process for detecting, analyzing, containing, recovering from, communicating, and learning from an event that threatens service, data, safety, or security.
Indirect Prompt Injection
Security & governance
A prompt-injection attack delivered through content the system retrieves or observes, such as a webpage, document, email, image text, or tool result, rather than directly through the user's instruction.
Inductive Bias
Models & inference
Structural or statistical assumptions that favor some functions or representations over others. Convolution favors locality and shared filters; causal masking favors prediction from preceding positions.
Inference
Models & inference
Executing a trained model to produce predictions, scores, embeddings, or generated tokens without performing an ordinary training update to its parameters.
Instruction Following
Prompting & context
A model capability to map natural-language directions and supplied context to behavior that satisfies the stated task and constraints.
Instruction Hierarchy
Prompting & context
A rule set for resolving conflicts among instructions from sources with different authority, such as application policy, users, and untrusted retrieved content.
Inter-Token Latency (ITL)
Infrastructure & serving
The elapsed time between two consecutive output-token arrival events for one request, calculated as `t_i - t_(i-1)` for an output token after the first.