Glossary · V
Terms starting with V
7 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.
VAE (Variational Autoencoder)
Models & inference
A latent-variable model trained with a reconstruction objective and a regularization term that keeps an approximate posterior close to a chosen prior. The reparameterization estimator allows gradients through stochastic latent sampling.
Vector Database
Retrieval & generation
A storage and indexing system that supports nearest-neighbor queries over vector representations, often with metadata filtering, persistence, and approximate indexes.
Verification Gate
Evaluation & safety
A control point that blocks progress until defined evidence satisfies a correctness or quality criterion.
Vision Transformer (ViT)
Multimodal systems
A vision architecture that represents an image as a sequence of patch embeddings with position information and processes that sequence with transformer encoder blocks.
Vision-Language Model (VLM)
Multimodal systems
A model that learns relationships between, or jointly processes, visual and language representations for tasks such as retrieval, description, question answering, or grounded generation.
Visual Grounding
Multimodal systems
Connecting a language expression to spatial evidence in an image or video, such as a region, object, mask, or tracked entity.
Vocabulary
Data & representations
The finite mapping between token identifiers and the units a tokenizer can emit, including ordinary, byte-level, and special control tokens.