Artificial Neural Networks and Deep Learning
The following are last minute news you should be aware of ;-)
27/01/2020: Published exam text example in the "Course Evaluation" session 13/01/2020: You can find here a detailed list of topics from the course you might expect will be requested at the exam 24/12/2019: Uploaded slides from last Lab and reference to the third and last competition! 05/12/2019: Updated version of seq2seq slides 02/12/2019: Second Kaggle competition published 21/11/2019: From today AN2DL Friday lectures are moved to class 26.16 16/11/2019: Kaggle Homework published together with material on Keras and Tensorflow2 04/11/2019: Fixed download of first lab material 16/10/2019: New deck of slides uploaded 15/10/2019: Thursday lectures moved to room 2.0.1 indeed! 10/10/2019: Today's lecture moved to Aula Rogers!!! 04/10/2019: Uploded slides about feed forward neural networks 04/10/2019: Today's lecture moved to 4.0.1!!! 26/09/2019: Uploaded slides about deep learning 24/09/2019: Thursday 26/09/2019 lecture will be in room B21 !!! 19/09/2019: No lecture on the 20/09/2019 ... check the detailed schedule. 19/09/2019: The course starts today!
Contents
Course Aim & Organization
Neural networks are mature, flexible, and powerful non-linear data-driven models that have successfully been applied to solve complex tasks in science and engineering. The advent of the deep learning paradigm, i.e., the use of (neural) network to simultaneously learn an optimal data representation and the corresponding model, has further boosted neural networks and the data-driven paradigm.
Nowadays, deep neural network can outperform traditional hand-crafted algorithms, achieving human performance in solving many complex tasks, such as natural language processing, text modeling, gene expression modeling, and image recognition. The course provides a broad introduction to neural networks (NN), starting from the traditional feedforward (FFNN) and recurrent (RNN) neural networks, till the most successful deep-learning models such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memories (LSTM).
The course major goal is to provide students with the theoretical background and the practical skills to understand and use NN, and at the same time become familiar and with Deep Learning for solving complex engineering problems.
Teachers
The course is composed of a blending of lectures and exercises by the course teachers and a teaching assistant.
- Matteo Matteucci: the course teacher
- Giacomo Boracchi: the course teacher
- Francesco Lattari: the course teaching assistant
Course Program and Syllabus
This goal is pursued in the course by:
- Presenting major theoretical results underpinning NN (e.g., universal approx, vanishing/exploding gradient, etc.)
- Describing the most important algorithms for NN training (e.g., backpropagation, adaptive gradient algorithms, etc.)
- Illustrating the best practices on how to successfully train and use these models (e.g., dropout, data augmentation, etc.)
- Providing an overview of the most successful Deep Learning architectures (e.g., CNNs, sparse and dense autoencoder, LSTMs for sequence to sequence learning, etc.)
- Providing an overview of the most successful applications with particular emphasis on models for solving visual recognition tasks.
We have compiled a detailed syllabus of the course student can use to doublecheck their preparation against before the exam.
- Course Syllabus: a detailed list of topics covered by the course and which students are expected to know when approaching the exam
Detailed course schedule
A detailed schedule of the course can be found here; topics are just indicative while days and teachers are correct up to some last minute change (I will notify you by email). Please note that not all days we have lectures!!
Note: Lecture timetable interpretation * On Thursday, in L26.12, starts at 16:15, ends at 18:15 * On Friday, in 6.0.1, starts at 14:15, ends at 17:15
| Date | Day | Time | Room | Teacher | Type | Topic |
| 19/09/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 17:15 | L26.12 | Lecture | Giacomo Boracchi | Course Introduction |
| 20/09/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 6.0.1 | -- | -- | -- No Lecture Today -- |
| 26/09/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | B.2.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Introduction to Machine Learning |
| 27/09/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 6.0.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Perceptron and Hebian Learning |
| 03/10/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | L26.12 | -- | -- | -- No Lecture Today -- |
| 04/10/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 4.0.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Feedforward neural networks and Backpropagation |
| 10/10/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | Aula Rogers | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Error Functions |
| 11/10/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 16:15 | 6.0.1 | Lecture | Giacomo Boracchi | Introduction to Image Classification |
| 17/10/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Neural Networks and Template Matching |
| 18/10/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 6.0.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Facing Overfitting |
| 24/10/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Training tricks and Vanishing gradient |
| 25/10/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 6.0.1 | Practicals | Francesco Lattari | Keras examples ... |
| 31/10/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Giacomo Boracchi | Introduction to Convolutional Neural Networks |
| 01/11/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 6.0.1 | -- | -- | -- No Lecture Today -- |
| 07/11/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Giacomo Boracchi | CNN architectures |
| 08/11/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 16:15 | 6.0.1 | Lecture | Giacomo Boracchi | Training with data scarcity |
| 14/11/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Giacomo Boracchi | CNN for image segmentation |
| 15/11/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 6.0.1 | Practicals | Francesco Lattari | Keras examples ... |
| 21/11/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Giacomo Boracchi | CNN for localization and detection |
| 22/11/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 16:15 | 26.16 | Lecture | Giacomo Boracchi | GAN |
| 28/11/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Recurrent Neural Networks and LSTM |
| 29/11/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 26.16 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Sequence 2 Sequence Learning |
| 05/12/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Attention Mechanism and The Transformer |
| 06/12/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 26.16 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Word embedding |
| 12/12/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | -- | -- | -- | -- No Lecture Today -- |
| 13/12/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | 26.16 | Practicals | Francesco Lattari | Keras examples ... |
| 19/12/2019 | Thursday | 16:15 - 18:15 | 2.0.1 | Lecture | Matteo Matteucci | Competitiong highlights |
| 20/12/2019 | Friday | 14:15 - 17:15 | -- | -- | -- | -- No Lecture Today -- |
| 10/01/2020 | Friday | 14:30 - 15:30 | DEIB Seminar Room | Seminar | Luigi Malago' | Meta Learning Seminar |
Course Evaluation
Course evaluation is composed of two parts:
- A written examination covering the whole program graded up to 27/32
- A home project in the form of a Kaggle style competition practicing the topics of the course graded up to 5/32
The final score will sum the grade of the written exam and the grade of the home project.
Teaching Material (the textbook)
Lectures will be based on material from different sources, teachers will provide their slides to students as soon they are available. As a general reference you can check the following text, but keep in mind that teachers will not follow it strictly
- Deep Learning. Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, MIT Press, 2016.
Course Slides
Slides from the lectures by Matteo Matteucci
- [2019/2020] Course Introduction: introductory slides of the course with useful information about the course syllabus, grading, and the course logistics.
- [2019/2020] Machine Learning vs Deep Learning: introduction to machine learning paradigms and definition of deep learning with examples
- [2019/2020] From Perceptrons to Feed Forward Neural Networks: the original Perceptron model, Hebbian learning, feed-forward architecture, backpropagation and gradient descent, error functions and maximum likelihood estimation
- [2019/2020] Neural Networks Training: dealing with overfitting (weight decay, early stopping, dropout), vanishing gradient (ReLU and friends), batch normalization
- [2019/2020] Recurrent Neural Networks: learning with sequences, Recurrent Neural Networks, vanishing gradient, Long Short-Term Memories (LSTM).
- [2019/2020] Sequence 2 Sequence Learning: sequence to sequence learning as an encoder-decoder problem, Neural Turing Machines, attention mechanisms, the Transformer.
- [2019/2020] Word Embedding: neural autoencoders, language models, word embedding, word2vec, glove.
Slides from the lectures by Giacomo Boracchi are available in his webpage, for you
- Image Classification: Image classification and related issues, template matching, image classification via nearest neighbors methods, image classification via linear classifiers, image classification via hand-crafted features.
Slides from the practicals by Francesco Lattari
- [2019/2020] Introduction to Keras: Introduction to Keras and Tensorflow2 (slides + notebook)
- [2019/2020] Convolutional architectures in Keras: How to build, train, and evaluate convolutional models for classification and segmentation in Keras and Tensorflow2 (slides + notebook)
- [2019/2020] Recurrent architectures in Keras: How to build, train, and evaluate recurrent neural architectures in Keras and Tensorflow2 (slides + notebook)
Kaggle Homeworks
As part of the evaluation (up to 5 marks in the final grade) we are issuing 3 homeworks in the form of Kaggle competitions. They are meant to practice the course topics on simple image recognition tasks.
- Image Classification Homework: the first homework is about image classification with convolutional neural networks. The deadline to submit the results is November the 30th.
- Image Segmentation Homework: the second homework is about image segmentation with convolutional neural networks and the like. The deadline to submit the results is December the 17th.
- Visual Question Answering Homework: the third homework is about visual question answering with convolutional and recurrent neural networks ... plus word2vec. The deadline to submit the results is January the 15th.
