CMP784 · Fall 2026

Detailed Syllabus & Lectures

Lecture topics, preparation material, required readings, videos, and additional resources collected in one place.

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Lecture index

Lecture 01

Introduction to Deep Learning

September 21, 2026

Slides

course information, what is deep learning, a brief history of deep learning, compositionality, end-to-end learning, distributed representations

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Additional Resources:

Lecture 02

Machine Learning Overview

September 28, 2026

Slides

types of machine learning problems, linear models, loss functions, linear regression, gradient descent, overfitting and generalization, regularization, cross-validation, bias-variance tradeoff, maximum likelihood estimation

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 03

Multi-layer Perceptrons

October 5, 2026

Slides

feed-forward neural networks, activation functions, chain rule, backpropagation, computational graph, automatic differentiation, distributed word representations

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 04

Training Deep Neural Networks

October 12, 2026

Slides

data preprocessing, weight initialization, normalization, regularization, model ensembles, dropout, optimization methods

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 05

Convolutional Neural Networks

October 19, 2026

Slides

convolution layer, pooling layer, evolution of depth, design guidelines, residual connections, semantic segmentation networks, object detection networks, backpropagation in CNNs

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 06

Understanding and Visualizing Convolutional Neural Networks

October 26, 2026

Slides

transfer learning, interpretability, visualizing neuron activations, visualizing class activations, pre-images, adversarial examples, adversarial training

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:

  • Andrej Karpathy's Stanford CS231n Lecture 9

Additional Resources:

Lecture 07

Recurrent Neural Networks

November 2, 2026

Slides

sequence modeling, recurrent neural networks (RNNs), RNN applications, vanilla RNN, training RNNs, long short-term memory (LSTM), LSTM variants, gated recurrent unit (GRU)

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 08

Attention, Transformers and Memory

November 9, 2026

Slides

content-based attention, location-based attention, soft vs. hard attention, self-attention, attention for image captioning, transformer networks

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 09

Deep Generative Models - Part 1

November 16, 2026

Slides

unsupervised learning, sparse coding, autoencoders, autoregressive models

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 10

Deep Generative Models - Part 2

November 30, 2026

Slides

generative adversarial networks (GANs), conditional GANs, applications of GANs

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 11

Deep Generative Models - Part 3

December 7, 2026

Slides

variational autoencoders (VAEs), vector quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAEs), denoising diffusion models

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources:

Lecture 12

Self-supervised Learning

December 14, 2026

Slides

what is self-supervised learning, self-supervised learning in NLP, self-supervised learning in vision

Please study the following material in preparation for the class:

Required Reading:

Suggested Video Material:


Additional Resources: