Terms starting with T

19 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.

Tail Latency
Reliability & operations
The latency experienced by the slowest portion of requests, commonly summarized with a high percentile under a stated workload and time window.
Temperature
Models & inference
A decoding parameter that rescales logits before a probability distribution is formed. Higher positive values usually flatten the distribution; lower positive values sharpen it.
Tensor
Data & representations
A typed array with a shape, data type, and device placement that frameworks use to represent inputs, parameters, activations, and gradients. Automatic-differentiation metadata is framework- and operation-dependent, not an inherent property of every tensor.
Tensor Parallelism
Infrastructure & serving
Partitioning tensor operations within a model layer across devices, with collective communication combining partial results during the layer computation.
Termination Condition
Agents & tools
An explicit rule that ends or pauses an agent run when it succeeds, fails, exhausts a budget, reaches a safe boundary, or requires escalation.
Test Oracle
AI-native development
The mechanism, specification, reference, invariant, or human judgment used to decide whether observed program behavior is correct.
Threat Model
Security & governance
A documented account of protected assets, trust boundaries, potential adversaries, assumed capabilities, attack paths, impacts, and planned controls.
Time per Output Token (TPOT)
Infrastructure & serving
For one request with `N > 1` output tokens, the average post-first-token interval: `(t_N - t_1) / (N - 1)`. System distributions then aggregate those per-request averages.
Time to First Token (TTFT)
also: TTFT
Models & inference
The elapsed time from submitting a generation request until the client receives the first output token or content event under a defined measurement boundary.
Token
Data & representations
An integer identifier produced by a model-specific tokenizer from text, bytes, images, audio, or another input representation. A token can be a whole word, part of a word, punctuation, whitespace, a byte sequence, or a special control symbol.
Token Budget
Prompting & context
An explicit allocation of token capacity across instructions, evidence, history, tool results, reasoning or working space, and output.
Tokenization
Data & representations
Converting an input representation into the ordered token identifiers a specific model or tokenizer accepts.
Tokens per Second (TPS)
also: TPS, output token throughput
Infrastructure & serving
A throughput measure reporting how many output tokens a serving system produces per unit time under a stated scope and workload.
Tool Contract
Agents & tools
The complete agreement for a tool boundary: purpose, typed inputs, outputs, validation, permissions, side effects, errors, timeouts, idempotency, and evidence returned to the caller.
Top-k Sampling
Models & inference
A decoding method that restricts the next-token distribution to the k highest-scoring candidates, renormalizes their probabilities, and samples from that set.
Trace
AI-native development
A correlated record of one request or task across model calls, retrieval, tools, state transitions, retries, approvals, and evaluations.
Transfer Learning
Math & training
Starting from representations or parameters learned on one data distribution or objective and adapting them for another. The transferable components and update strategy depend on architecture and task.
Transformer
Models & inference
A neural-network architecture built from attention, position information, feed-forward sublayers, residual connections, and normalization. Encoder, decoder, and encoder-decoder variants use different masks and information flows.
Trust Boundary
Security & governance
An interface where data, instructions, identity, or authority crosses between components or principals that operate under different trust assumptions.