Glossary · N
Terms starting with N
3 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.
NaN (Not a Number)
Math & training
A floating-point value representing an undefined or unrepresentable numerical result. In training, NaNs can come from invalid operations, overflow, unstable normalization, excessive updates, or earlier corrupted values.
Normalization
Math & training
A family of transformations that rescale or recenter inputs, activations, or features using defined statistics. Batch normalization and layer normalization use different axes and behave differently across training and inference.
Nucleus Sampling (Top-p)
also: Top-p sampling
Models & inference
A decoding method that samples from the smallest set of next-token candidates whose cumulative probability reaches a chosen threshold.