Projects should be done in teams of 3-4 students. Your project will be worth 46% of your final class grade, and will have 4 deliverables:

  1. Proposal : 2 pages excluding references (10%)
  2. Midway Report : 4-5 pages excluding references (20%)
  3. Presentation : oral presentation (20%)
  4. Final Report : 6-8 pages excluding references (50%)

All write-ups should use the NeurIPS style.

Team Formation

You are responsible for forming project teams of 3-4 people. Once you have formed your group, please sign up your team in a google sheet (TBA).

Project Proposal

You must turn in a brief project proposal that provides an overview of your idea and also contains a brief survey of related work on the topic. We may provide a list of potential project ideas for you to choose from, but you are free to define any other ideas as appropriate, whether applied or theoretical.

Proposals should be approximately two pages long, and should include the following information:

  • Project title and list of group members.
  • Overview of project idea. (This should be approximately half a page long.)
  • A short literature survey of relevant papers. (The literature review should take up half to one page.)
  • Description of potential datasets and evaluation to use for the experiments.
    • Given the tight timeline, it's fine to use synthetic/toy data for proof-of-concept experiments.
  • Plan of activities, including what you plan to complete by the midway report and how you plan to divide up the work.

The grading breakdown for the proposal is as follows:

  • 40% for clear and concise description of proposed method and evaluation
  • 40% for literature survey
  • 10% for plan of activities
  • 10% for quality of writing

Midway Report

The midway report will serve as a check-point at the halfway mark of your project. It should be about 4-5 pages long, and should be formatted like a conference paper, with the following sections: introduction, background & related work, methods, experiments, conclusion. The sections on the experiments and conclusions will have the results you have obtained, perhaps with place-holders for the results you plan/hope to obtain.

The (tentative) grading breakdown for the midway report is as follows:

  • 20% for introduction and literature survey
  • 40% for proposed method
  • 30% for data collection, preliminary results, the design of upcoming experiments, and revised plan of activities (in an appendix, please show the old and new activity plans)
  • 10% for quality of writing

Final Report

Your final report is expected to be 6-8 pages excluding references. It should have roughly the following format:

  • Introduction: problem definition and motivation
  • Background & Related Work: background info and literature survey
  • Methods – Overview of your proposed method – Intuition on why should it be better than the existing methods – Details of models and algorithms that you developed
  • Experiments – Description of your testbed and a list of questions your experiments are designed to answer – Details of the experiments and (preliminary) results
  • Conclusion: discussion and future work

The (tentative) grading breakdown for the final report is as follows:

  • 10% for introduction and literature survey
  • 40% for proposed method (soundness and originality)
  • 15% for correctness and completeness of experiments and figures
  • 15% for empirical and theoretical analysis of results and methods
  • 20% for quality of writing (clarity, organization, flow, etc.)

Presentation

All project teams will present their work at the end of the quarter. Each team should prepare an oral presentation and present it during the allocated time. The estimated length of each talk 15 - 20 mins in total.