Nishant Thapa

Papers

Reviews and walkthroughs of research papers.

Neural Machine Translation by jointly learning to Align and Translate

How Bahdanau et al. (2014) replaced the fixed-length context vector with soft attention, the paper that introduced the attention mechanism.

Aug 17, 2026paper-review · orginal attention · Bahdanau Attention

Papers

Attention Is All You Need

A walkthrough of the Transformer architecture — how self-attention replaced recurrence, and why that mattered.

Aug 10, 2026transformers · attention · nlp · paper-review

Machine Learning

Notes on ML concepts, models, and techniques.

Machine Learning

K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN)

A simple, non-parametric algorithm that classifies a point by looking at its closest neighbors — how it works, how to pick k, and where it breaks down.

Sep 1, 2026machine-learning · classification · knn

Machine Learning

Part 1: Quickly revise ML concepts

A theoretical walkthrough Machine Learning Concepts

Sep 1, 2026machine-learning · unsupervised · supervised

System Design

Breakdowns of how real systems are designed and scaled.

System Design

Design: URL Shortener

A quick high-level design walkthrough for a URL shortener like bit.ly — encoding scheme, data model, and the read-heavy scaling story.

Sep 5, 2026system-design · high-level-design