Overview

The goal of this project is for you to develop your skills in conducting and communicating original research. You will design and investigate a novel idea involving deep learning. It will be a self-designed project in consultation with the teaching assistant. The only requirement is it includes a deep learning component with analysis. This is an opportunity for you to enhance your expertise on a topic you feel passionate about.

Your final project will constitute 40% of your total class grade. Your project grade will be calculated as follows:

Project Proposal

The project proposal should:

1. Specify your group: you are strongly encouraged to work with a partner (but can work alone with approval from the teaching assistant)
2. Establish the research problem and novel idea you will tackle for your final project
3. Identify relevant related work

When choosing your topic, general guidelines are to:

• Choose a problem you have an idea for how to solve
• Choose a problem someone else cares about
• Choose a problem that is not yet solved (know current literature!)
• Choose a problem that you can objectively evaluate by tying it to a task

Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

• A comprehensive and critical survey of the literature on a particular deep learning problem
• Implementation and evaluation of an existing or new deep learning model alongside experiments that demonstrate the model's strengths and weaknesses

• Title for your project
• [Section 1] Introduction
• Paragraph 1: Explain the motivation for your work; e.g., Why anyone should care? What are the desired benefits?
• Paragraph 2: Explain why existing solutions work is inadequate for the motivated problem; e.g., Is there a gap in the literature? Is there a weakness in existing approaches?
• Paragraph 3: Explain what you are proposing, what is novel/new about your idea, and why you believe this solution will be better than previous solutions; e.g., Are you asking a new question, offering a greater understanding of a research problem, establishing a new methodology to solve a problem, building a new software tool, or offering greater understanding about existing methods/tools?
• [Section 2] Related Work

• Identify 2-4 related topics. Then, for each topic, cite 2-4 related papers (must include the bibliography). Finally, for each cluster of related works, give a 1-2 sentence explanation describing the key difference(s) of your proposed idea to the cluster of prior works. One way to format each topic is as follows:

  Topic:

  • Reference 1
  • Reference 2
  • Reference 3
  • Reference 4

  Our work is different from these works because...

• Bibliography: this must be formatted correctly.

Please note that your proposed project is not a binding contract. You will continue to update and improve it as you learn more from your readings and/or feedback.

Project Outline

The project outline should map out the entire project. You will be expected to:

1. Submit a detailed project outline that is 3-4 pages long (excluding references).

The paper should include each of the following:

• Title
• [Section 1] Introduction - improve upon the material from your proposal
• [Section 2] Related Work - update the material from your proposal so this section includes a paragraph per topic instead of a bullet list per topic; the bullet list served only as a foundation to help you concisely identify how your work will improve upon what is available/known today
• [Section 3] Methods - describe the implementation of your proposed idea (e.g., features, algorithm(s), training overview) so that:
  • A reader could reproduce your set-up
  • A reader understand why you made your design decisions
• [Section 4] Experimental Design - describe 1-2 experiments or analyses you plan to conduct in order to demonstrate/validate the target contribution(s) of your work. Your description should be detailed enough so that a reader could reproduce it. Your description should include the following for each experiment:
  • Main purpose: 1-3 sentence high level explanation
  • Evaluation Metric(s): which ones will you use and why?
• [Section 5] Bibliography

Final Project Video

The final project presentation should be a 5 minute recorded video about your project. Your video should do the following:

• Motivate the problem your work is designed to solve.
• (Very) briefly explain what other solutions are available and why they are not suitable.
• Demo your idea, approach, and key design decisions.
• Highlight key findings from your experiments and offer insights into what your work has taught us. Focus on finding 1-3 punchlines that explain why your work is exciting/valuable.

Please design your video for an audience who has not taken the class. In other words, your mom, dad, friend, or a potential employer should be able to watch it and understand what you did and why what you did is valuable.

You must submit a URL (either public or unlisted) that links to your video in your Canvas submission. Please verify viewing permissions are set properly before submission or your grade will be penalized.

Peer Evaluation

Final Project Report

For the final project submission, you should submit a final report that is at least 7 pages long (excluding references). It should include each of the following: