Course Info

Deep learning is a powerful and relatively new branch of machine learning. In recent years it has been successfully applied to some of the most challenging problems in the broad field of AI, such as recognizing objects in an image, converting speech to text or playing games. In many such tasks, the state of the art performance today is attained by deep-learning algorithms, in some cases surpassing human-level performance.

This course will focus on the theory and algorithms behind deep learning, as well as on software techniques that allow efficient training of deep learning algorithms. It is a graduate-level course which provides both the necessary theoretical background and the hands-on experience required to be an effective deep learning practitioner, or to start on the path towards deep learning research.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of the course, the student will:

  1. Understand the key notions of deep learning, such as neural networks, learning regimes, optimization algorithms and training methodologies.
  2. Be able to apply deep learning algorithms to real-world data and problems.
  3. Know how to effectively use python and pytorch to implement models and algorithms from the recent literature.
  4. Perform a small research project using the studied notions and techniques.

Administration

Evaluation:

First Homework assignment : 10% Second Homework assignment : 25% Third Homework assignment : 25% Final Project: 40%

The Project might have a competitive component to it. If there will be, the course staff will anounce it in advance.

Reserve Duty: Please come to the tutor in charge if you have specific needs due to army servise.

Language: All course materials (including lecture and tutorial videos) are provided in English. This semester the frontal lectures and tutorials will be in Hebrew.

Credits: 3.0.

Prerequisites

This is an advanced course. Without both mathematical maturity and programming competency it will be very challenging to complete. The recommended pre-requisites are as follows:

  • A good background of linear algebra, probability and calculus. See the supplemental material page if you need a refresher on one of these.
  • Programming competency. The course will be very hands-on; much programming will be required. We will use Python exclusively, so it’s crucial to have experience with it.
  • An introductory course about machine learning and/or signal/image processing.

Collaboration Policy and Honor Code

By enrolling in this course, you agree that you will strictly follow our collaboration policy as specified below. Any violation of this policy will result in an immediate failure in the course, and treatment by the Technion regulations committee.

  1. Submission of assignments is in singles or pairs. You are free to form study groups and discuss homeworks with other students. However, you must implement all required code independently of other groups (only with your submission partner).
  2. Submitted work must only be your own. You must do your own thinking, coding, debugging and write all answers yourself. We will run automatic plagiarism-detection software on your submissions to enforce this policy.
  3. You may not use any solutions from previous semesters’ homeworks.
  4. You may not share your solutions with other students.
  5. You may not upload your homework solutions to any public website, such as github. Private repos are OK, but they must remain so even after course completion.

Course Staff

The course staff:

Lecturers

Dr. Chaim Baskin

Dr. Chaim Baskin

Lecturer in charge

TAs

Moshe Kimhi

Moshe Kimhi

Head TA

Tamir Shor

Tamir Shor

TA

Checkers

Yair Davidson

Yair Davidson

Homework Checker

Ohad Einav

Ohad Einav

Homework Checker

Literature

The course does not follow any specific book due to the rapid changes in the field. For your own reference, the following material may be useful.

  • Deep Learning

    Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville

    MIT Press, 2016

Detailed Syllabus

The lectures and tutorials are In person, and suplementry matirial with teoretical background exist in the Lectures page.

The tutorials are based on detailed and self-contained Jupyter notebooks, which guide you through.

The course also includes hands-on homework assignments in which you’ll implement working real-world models and run them on GPUs on the course servers. Performing the assignments by yourself is a crucial aspect of the course, which will provide you with many of the technical skills required to be effective with Deep Learning.

This semester’s syllabus is provided below. Please watch the linked (🔗) video lecture before each respective class.

# Date Lecture Supplemental (video) Tutorial Homework
1 18/01/2024 Introduction + Supervised learning   Supervised learning, PyTorch I HW1
2 25/01/2024 Neural networks, CNNs I Supervised learning(🔗) MLP, PyTorch II  
3 01/02/2024 Neural networks, CNNs II CNN 🔗 CNNs  
4 08/02/2024 Optimization and Training I Optimization (🔗) Optimization  
5 15/02/2024 Optimization and Training II   Automatic diffrentiation HW2
6 22/02/2024 Sequence models   Object detection  
7 29/02/2024 Attention   RNN  
8 07/03/2024 Transformers Sequence models (🔗) Attention HW3
9 14/03/2024 VIT Unsupervised learning (🔗) Transformers  
10 21/03/2024 GAN   GANs  
11 04/04/2024 VAE   VAEs Final Project
12 11/04/2024 Diffusion models   Diffusion models