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Statement This class is largely built upon the materials from Prof. Robin Jia.

News:

Some problems in computer science admit precise algorithmic solutions. Checking if someone is in a national park is, in some sense, straightforward: get the user’s location, get the boundaries of all national parks, and check if the user location lies within any of those boundaries.

Other problems are less straightforward. Suppose you want your computer to determine if an image contains a bird. To your computer, an image is just a matrix of red, green, and blue pixels. How do you even begin to write the function is_bird(image)?

For problems like this, we turn to a powerful family of methods known as machine learning. The zen of machine learning is the following:

  1. I don’t know how to solve my problem.
  2. But I can obtain a dataset that describes what I want my computer to do.
  3. So, I will write a program that learns the desired behavior from the data.

This class will provide a broad introduction to machine learning. We will start with supervised learning, where our goal is to learn an input-to-output mapping given a set of correct input-output pairs. Next, we will study unsupervised learning, which seeks to identify hidden structure in data. Finally, we will cover reinforcement learning, in which an agent (e.g., a robot) learns from observations it makes as it explores the world.

Course Staff

Jieyu Zhao
Jieyu Zhao
Instructor

Taiwei Shi
Taiwei Shi
Teaching Assistant

Ao Xu
Ao Xu
Teaching Assistant

Steven Shi
Steven Shi
Course Producer

Logistics

Prerequisites

This class will also use some basic multivariate calculus (taking partial derivatives and gradients). However, knowledge of single-variable calculus is sufficient as we will introduce the required material during class and section.

All programming assignments will be in Python. Basics of Python will be covered in discussion sections. Students who are not familiar with Python may need to spend some time becoming more familiar with it as needed.

Schedule

All assignments are due by 11:59pm on the indicated date.

Slides and lecture materials will be uploaded after each class.

Date Topic Related Readings Assignments
Mon Aug 26 Introduction (lecture) PML 1 Homework 0 released (pdf, latex, code)
Wed Aug 28 Linear Regression (lecture, demo) PML 7.8, 8.2  
Fri Aug 30 Section (notes): Review of Probability & Linear Algebra {Ao Xu}    
Mon Sep 2 Labor Day Holiday. No Class    
Wed Sep 4 Featurization, Convexity, Maximum Likelihood Estimation (lecture) PML 2.6.3, 4.2, 8.1  
Fri Sep 6 Section (notes {Ao Xu}): Numpy & pytorch tutorial   Homework 0 due
Mon Sep 9 Logistic Regression, Softmax Regression (lecture) PML 10.1-10.3 Homework 1 released (pdf, latex, code)
Wed Sep 11 Overfitting, Regularization (lecture) PML 4.5, 4.7, 11.3-11.4  
Fri Sep 13 Section (Ao): Calculus and Gradients (section)    
Mon Sep 16 Bias and Variance, Normal Equations (lecture) PML 11.2  
Wed Sep 18 Generative Classifiers, Naive Bayes (slides) PML 9.3-9.4  
Fri Sep 20 Section (Taiwei): Cross-Validation, Evaluation Metrics (section)    
Mon Sep 23 Nearest Neighbors, start of Kernels; Project discussion (lecture) PML 16.1, 16.3 Homework 1 due
Wed Sep 25 Kernel methods (lecture) PML 4.3, 17.1, 17.3 Homework 2 released (pdf, latex, code)
Fri Sep 27 Section (Ao Xu): Review of linear methods (section)    
Mon Sep 30 Introduction to Neural Networks (lecture) PML 13.1-13.2 Project Proposal due
Wed Oct 2 Backpropagation (lecture, demo part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) PML 13.3  
Fri Oct 4 Section ( Taiwei ): Pytorch tutorial (colab)    
Mon Oct 7 Neural Network Optimizers, Dropout, Early Stopping (slides) PML 8.4, 13.4-13.5  
Wed Oct 9 Convolutional Neural Networks (slides) PML 14.1-14.2  
Fri Oct 11 Fall Recess. No class.    
Mon Oct 14 Embedding models, Word Vectors (slides) PML 20.5  
Wed Oct 16 Recurrent Neural Networks (slides) PML 15.1-15.2  
Fri Oct 18 Section (Ao Xu): Implentations of the Convolution Operation (slides)    
Mon Oct 21 Sequence-to-sequence, Attention (slides) PML 15.4 Homework 2 due
Wed Oct 23 Decision Trees, ensembles (slides) PML 18.1-18.5  
Fri Oct 25 Section (Taiwei): Midterm preparation (slides)    
Mon Oct 28 In-class Midterm Exam    
Wed Oct 30 Transformers I (slides) PML 15.5-15.6 Homework 3 released (pdf, latex, code)
Fri Nov 1 Section (Ao Xu): RNNs and backpropagation in pytorch (colab)    
Mon Nov 4 Transformers II, Pretraining (slides) PML 15.7  
Wed Nov 6 k-Means Clustering (lecture) PML 21.3 Project Midterm Report due
Fri Nov 8 Section (): Transformers in code    
Mon Nov 11 Veterans Day Holiday    
Wed Nov 13 Gaussian Mixture Models, Expectation Maximization (lecture) PML 21.4, PML2 8.1-8.2  
Fri Nov 15 Section (Taiwei Shi): Practical guide to pretrained language models (slides, code)    
Mon Nov 18 Finishing EM; Principal Components Analysis (lecture) PML2 34.1-34.4  
Wed Nov 20 Finishing PCA; Reinforcement Learning, start Multi-armed Bandits(lecture) PML2 34.5-34.6, 35.1, 35.4 Homework 3 due
Fri Nov 22 Section (Ao Xu): Practical guide to computer vision models (colab, slides)    
Mon Nov 25 Markov Decision Process, Q-Learning(lecture) PML2 35.2-35.3  
Wed Nov 27 Thanksgiving Holiday   Homework 4 released (pdf, latex, code)
Fri Nov 29 Thanksgiving Holiday    
Mon Dec 2 Finish RL(lecture) FAML 1-4  
Wed Dec 4 Brief intro to ChatGPT & Conclusion(slides)    
Fri Dec 6 Section: Final Exam preparation   Homework 4 due on Dec 7
Fri Dec 13 Final Exam, 2-4pm   Project Final Report due Mon, Dec 9

Grading

Grades will be based on homework assignments (40%), a class project (20%), and two exams (40%).

Homework Assignments (40% total):

Final Project (20% total). The final project will proceed in three stages:

Exams (40% total):

Late days

You have 6 late days you may use on any assignment excluding the Project Final Report. Each late day allows you to submit the assignment 24 hours later than the original deadline. You may use a maximum of 3 late days per assignment. If you are working in a group for the project, submitting the project proposal or midterm report one day late means that each member of the group spends a late day. We do not allow use of late days for the final project report because we must grade the projects in time to submit final course grades.

If you have used up all your late days and submit an assignment late, you will lose 10% of your grade on that assignment for each day late. We will not accept any assignments more than 3 days late.

Late submissions not covered by these 6 late days will incur a 10% grade deduction per day.

Final project

The final project can be done individually or in groups of up to 3. This is your chance to freely explore machine learning methods and how they can be applied to a task of our choice. You will also learn about best practices for developing machine learning methods—inspecting your data, establishing baselines, and analyzing your errors. More information about the final project is available here.

Resources

Prof. Robin Jia have written Lecture Notes that accompany all the iPad lectures. I recommend using these notes as reference material for studying. There is no required textbook for this class. Note that, we have slight modifications of the materials to accormadate to the fall semester.

If you do want to learn from a textbook, the following may be useful:

To review mathematical background material, you may also find the following useful:

Other Notes

Collaboration policy and academic integrity: Our goal is to maintain an optimal learning environment. You may discuss the homework problems at a high level with other students, but you should not look at another student’s solutions. Trying to find solutions online or from any other sources for any homework or project is prohibited, will result in zero grade and will be reported. Using AI tools to automatically generate solutions to written or programming problems is also prohibited. To prevent any future plagiarism, uploading any material from the course (your solutions, quizzes etc.) on the internet is prohibited, and any violations will also be reported. Please be considerate, and help us help everyone get the best out of this course.

Please remember the expectations set forth in the USC Student Handbook. General principles of academic honesty include the concept of respect for the intellectual property of others, the expectation that individual work will be submitted unless otherwise allowed by an instructor, and the obligations both to protect one’s own academic work from misuse by others as well as to avoid using another’s work as one’s own. All students are expected to understand and abide by these principles. Suspicion of academic dishonesty may lead to a referral to the Office of Academic Integrity for further review.

Students with disabilities: Any student requesting academic accommodations based on a disability is required to register with Disability Services and Programs (DSP) each semester. A letter of verification for approved accommodations can be obtained from DSP. Please be sure the letter is delivered to the instructor as early in the semester as possible.