While deep learning has achieved remarkable success in supervised and reinforcement learning problems, such as image classification, speech recognition, and game playing, these models are, to a large degree, specialized for the single task they are trained for. This course will cover the setting where there are multiple tasks to be solved, and study how the structure arising from multiple tasks can be leveraged to learn more efficiently or effectively. This includes:
This is a graduate-level course. By the end of the course, students will be able to understand and implement the state-of-the-art multi-task learning and meta-learning algorithms and be ready to conduct research on these topics.
The course will include live lectures over zoom, three homework assignments, a fourth optional homework assignment, and a course project. The lectures will discuss the fundamentals of topics required for understanding and designing multi-task and meta-learning algorithms in both supervised learning and reinforcement learning domains. The assignments will focus on coding problems that emphasize these fundamentals. Finally, students will present a short spotlight of their project proposal and, at the end of the quarter, their completed projects.
CS 229 or an equivalent introductory machine learning course is required. CS 221 or an equivalent introductory artificial intelligence course is recommended but not required.
If you are looking for publicly-available lecture videos from the Fall 2019 offering, they are here. Other materials from the Fall 2019 offering are here. Lecture videos from this Fall 2020 offering will be processed and made publicly available after the course. For students enrolled in the course, recorded lecture videos will be posted to canvas after each lecture.
Homeworks (15% each): There are three homework assignments, each worth 15% of the grade. Assignments will require training neural networks in TensorFlow in a Colab notebook. There is also a fourth homework assignment that will either replace one prior homework grade or part of the project grade (whichever is better for grade). All assignments are due to Gradescope at 11:59 pm Pacific Time on the respective due date.
Project (55%): There's a research-level project of your choice. You may form groups of 1-3 students to complete the project, and you are encouraged to start early! Further guidelines on the project will be posted shortly.
Late Days: You have 6 total late days across homeworks and project-related assignment submissions. You may use a maximum of 2 late days for any single assignment.
Honor Code: You are free to form study groups and discuss homeworks. However, you must write up homeworks and code from scratch independently. When debugging code together, you are only allowed to look at the input-output behavior of each other's programs and not the code itself.
All students should retain receipts for books and other course-related expenses, as these may be qualified educational expenses for tax purposes. If you are an undergraduate receiving financial aid, you may be eligible for additional financial aid for required books and course materials if these expenses exceed the aid amount in your award letter. For more information, review your award letter or visit the Student Budget website.
© Chelsea Finn 2020