Polaris ML/AI Training
Stage 3Week 7-10

Knowledge Ready

Master ML concepts and tech stack fundamentals. Understand the theory behind ML algorithms and production technologies.

Goal:Pass ML knowledge rounds
37items
🤖

AI/LLM Tools

7
📁

other

30

What is Regularization?

medium

Regularization: L1, L2, and Beyond

medium

What is overfitting? How do you prevent it?

ML Concept: 3-5 minutes to answer

easy

Explain the bias-variance tradeoff.

ML Concept: 4-6 minutes to answer

easy

Explain backpropagation. How does it work?

ML Concept: 5-7 minutes to answer

medium

Explain precision, recall, and F1 score. When to optimize for which?

ML Concept: 4-5 minutes to answer

easy

What is the attention mechanism in transformers?

ML Concept: 5-7 minutes to answer

medium

Compare zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting. When would you use each?

ML Concept: 4-6 minutes to answer

easy

When would you fine-tune an LLM vs using prompting?

ML Concept: 5-7 minutes to answer

medium

Explain function calling in LLMs. How does the model decide when to use tools?

ML Concept: 5-6 minutes to answer

medium

What causes LLM hallucinations? How do you detect and prevent them?

ML Concept: 5-7 minutes to answer

medium

How do you evaluate LLM outputs? What metrics matter?

ML Concept: 5-7 minutes to answer

medium

How do you manage context windows in LLM applications?

ML Concept: 4-6 minutes to answer

medium

Explain RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). When and how would you use it?

ML Concept: 5-7 minutes to answer

medium

Compare GPT-4, Claude, and open-source LLMs. When would you use each?

ML Concept: 4-6 minutes to answer

medium

How do you ensure LLMs output valid structured data (JSON, specific formats)?

ML Concept: 5-7 minutes to answer

medium

AI Orchestration: How do you coordinate multiple AI agents in workflows?

ML Concept: 8-10 minutes to answer

hard

You mention 'Python (Advanced)' on your resume. Explain Python's GIL and how it affects multi-threading in ML workloads.

Python - Tests deep Python knowledge and understanding of concurrency

hard

Explain Python's type hints and how you use them in production ML code. Why are they important?

Python - Tests modern Python practices and code quality

medium

Walk me through your code structure for a production ML API. What design patterns do you use?

Python - Tests software engineering maturity and production experience

hard

Your ML interview website is built with TypeScript. Why TypeScript over JavaScript for this project?

TypeScript - Tests understanding of TypeScript benefits and frontend architecture

medium

You mention React experience from Android/React Native. How did you apply that to building web interfaces for your ML projects?

React - Tests ability to transfer skills and build production UIs

medium

Why did you choose Next.js for your ML interview website instead of plain React?

Next.js - Tests understanding of framework tradeoffs and SSR/SSG

medium

You've built 4 production FastAPI services. What are your REST API design principles?

REST APIs - Tests API design maturity and best practices

hard

You use pgvector for semantic search in your RAG chatbot. How does it work and why PostgreSQL over a dedicated vector DB?

PostgreSQL - Tests understanding of vector search and database tradeoffs

hard

You mention 35% cache hit rate with Redis. Walk me through your caching strategy.

Redis - Tests understanding of caching strategies and optimization

medium

You fine-tuned BERT for sentiment analysis (89% F1). Explain the fine-tuning process step-by-step.

BERT - Tests practical NLP experience and understanding of transfer learning

hard

You used ResNet50 for image classification (94% accuracy). Why ResNet over other architectures?

ResNet - Tests understanding of CV architectures and transfer learning

medium

You implemented Grad-CAM for model interpretability. How does it work and why is it useful?

Grad-CAM - Tests understanding of model interpretability and explainability

hard

You mention AWS (S3, EC2, SageMaker). How have you used these services in your ML projects?

AWS - Tests cloud infrastructure experience

medium