Glossary · W
Terms starting with W
4 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.
Warmup
Math & training
An initial training phase in which the learning rate rises from a smaller value toward the main schedule's target value.
Weight
Math & training
A trainable coefficient in a model transformation. Weights are usually organized into tensors, and optimization adjusts them to reduce the training objective.
Weight Decay
Math & training
An update rule that reduces selected parameter magnitudes over training, often by multiplying weights by a shrinkage factor separate from the gradient update.
Worktree
AI-native development
In Git, a working directory attached to a repository and branch or commit, with shared object storage but its own checked-out files and index.