COMPSCI 682 Neural Networks: A Modern Introduction

Important Dates

Course project proposal: Oct. 6 (due 11:59pm on gradescope)
Course project milestone: Nov. 5 (due 11:59pm on gradescope)
Final course project write-up: Nov. 19 Dec. 1 (due 11:59pm on gradescope)

Overview

The Course Project is an opportunity for you to apply what you have learned in class to a problem of your interest.

Your are encouraged to select a topic and work on your own project. Potential projects usually fall into these two tracks:

• Applications. If you're coming to the class with a specific background and interests (e.g. biology, engineering, physics), we'd love to see you apply deep neural networks to problems related to your particular domain of interest. Pick a real-world problem and apply deep neural networks to solve it.
• Models. You can build a new model (algorithm) with deep neural networks, or a new variant of existing models, and apply it to tackle vision tasks. This track might be more challenging, and sometimes leads to a piece of publishable work.

Here you can find some sample project ideas professor provided last year:

• Sample project ideas (Google Docs)

To inspire ideas, you might look at recent deep learning publications from top-tier vision conferences, as well as other resources below.

• Awesome Deep Vision
• CVPR: IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
• ICCV: International Conference on Computer Vision
• ECCV: European Conference on Computer Vision
• NIPS: Neural Information Processing Systems
• ICLR: International Conference on Learning Representations
• Kaggle challenges: An online machine learning competition website. For example, a Yelp classification challenge.

For applications, this type of projects would involve careful data preparation, an appropriate loss function, details of training and cross-validation and good test set evaluations and model comparisons. Don't be afraid to think outside of the box. Some successful examples can be found below:

• Teaching Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Go
• Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Winning the Galaxy Challenge with convnets

Deep neural networks also run in real time on mobile phones and Raspberry Pi's - feel free to go the embedded way. You may find this TensorFlow demo on Android helpful.

For models, deep neural networks have been successfully used in a variety of computer vision and NLP tasks. This type of projects would involve understanding the state-of-the-art vision or NLP models, and building new models or improving existing models. The list below presents some papers on recent advances of deep neural networks in the computer vision community.

• Object recognition: [Krizhevsky et al.], [Russakovsky et al.], [Szegedy et al.], [Simonyan et al.], [He et al.]
• Object detection: [Girshick et al.], [Sermanet et al.], [Erhan et al.]
• Image segmentation: [Long et al.]
• Video classification: [Karpathy et al.], [Simonyan and Zisserman]
• Scene classification: [Zhou et al.]
• Face recognition: [Taigman et al.]
• Depth estimation: [Eigen et al.]
• Image-to-sentence generation: [Karpathy and Fei-Fei], [Donahue et al.], [Vinyals et al.]
• Visualization and optimization: [Szegedy et al.], [Nguyen et al.], [Zeiler and Fergus], [Goodfellow et al.], [Schaul et al.]

We also provide a list of popular computer vision datasets:

• Meta Pointer: A large collection organized by CV Datasets.
• Yet another Meta pointer
• ImageNet: a large-scale image dataset for visual recognition organized by WordNet hierarchy
• SUN Database: a benchmark for scene recognition and object detection with annotated scene categories and segmented objects
• Places Database: a scene-centric database with 205 scene categories and 2.5 millions of labelled images
• NYU Depth Dataset v2: a RGB-D dataset of segmented indoor scenes
• Microsoft COCO: a new benchmark for image recognition, segmentation and captioning
• Flickr100M: 100 million creative commons Flickr images
• Labeled Faces in the Wild: a dataset of 13,000 labeled face photographs
• Human Pose Dataset: a benchmark for articulated human pose estimation
• YouTube Faces DB: a face video dataset for unconstrained face recognition in videos
• UCF101: an action recognition data set of realistic action videos with 101 action categories
• HMDB-51: a large human motion dataset of 51 action classes

Grading Policy (*updated)

  Final Project: (40% of final grade)
  - Proposal: 5% of the final project (2% of final grade)
  - Milestone: 12.5% of the final project (5% of final grade)
  - Final report: 77.5% of the final project (31% of final grade)
    write-up: 22.5% of the final project (9% of final grade) 
     •  clarity, structure, language, references
     •  background literature survey, good understanding of the problem
     •  good insights and discussions of methodology, analysis, results, etc.
    technical: 30% of the final project (12% of final grade)
     •  correctness
     •  depth
     •  innovation
    evaluation and results: 25% of the final project (10% of final grade)
     •  sound evaluation metric
     •  thoroughness in analysis and experimentation
     •  results and performance
  - Poster/Presentation: 5% of the final presentation (2% of final grade)
     •  +2% (of final grade) bonus for best few posters

Project Proposal

The project proposal should be concise (200-400 words). You can use the provided template. Your proposal should contain:

• Who are the (1~2) group members? (Remmber to add your teammate on gradescope) What will each person do? (This needs to be a separate detailed paragraph)
• If the project is shared with another class, which portion of the work will be counted for each class? (This needs to be a separate detailed paragraph)
• What is the problem that you will be investigating? Why is it interesting?
• What data will you use? If you are collecting new datasets, how do you plan to collect them?
• What method or algorithm are you proposing? If there are existing implementations, will you use them and how? How do you plan to improve or modify such implementations?
• What reading will you examine to provide context and background?
• How will you evaluate your results? Qualitatively, what kind of results do you expect (e.g. plots or figures)? Quantitatively, what kind of analysis will you use to evaluate and/or compare your results (e.g. what performance metrics or statistical tests)?

Submission: Please upload a PDF file to Gradescope. Please coordinate with your teammate and submit only under ONE of your accounts, and add your teammate on Gradescope.

Project Milestone

Your project milestone report should be between 2 - 3 pages using the provided template. The following is a suggested structure for your report:

• Title, Author(s)
• Introduction: this section introduces your problem, and the overall plan for approaching your problem
• Problem statement: Describe your problem precisely specifying the dataset to be used, expected results and evaluation
• Technical Approach: Describe the methods you intend to apply to solve the given problem
• Intermediate/Preliminary Results: State and evaluate your results upto the milestone

Submission: Please upload a PDF file to Gradescope. Please coordinate with your teammate and submit only under ONE of your accounts, and add your teammate on Gradescope.

Final Submission

Your final write-up should be between 6 - 8 pages using the provided template. After the class, we may decide to post the final reports online so that you can read about each others' work. If you do not want your writeup to be posted online, then please let us know at least a week in advance of the final writeup submission deadline.

Submission: Please upload a PDF file to Gradescope. Please coordinate with your teammate and submit only under ONE of your accounts, and add your teammate on Gradescope. You will submit a single pdf file including:

1. A pdf file of your final report
2. (OPTIONAL) supplementary can be concatenated at the end of the final report

Report. The following is a suggested structure for the report:

• Title, Author(s)
• Abstract: It should not be more than 300 words
• Introduction: this section introduces your problem, and the overall plan for approaching your problem
• Background/Related Work: This section discusses relevant literature for your project
• Approach: This section details the framework of your project. Be specific, which means you might want to include equations, figures, plots, etc
• Experiment: This section begins with what kind of experiments you're doing, what kind of dataset(s) you're using, and what is the way you measure or evaluate your results. It then shows in details the results of your experiments. By details, we mean both quantitative evaluations (show numbers, figures, tables, etc) as well as qualitative results (show images, example results, etc).
• Conclusion: What have you learned? Suggest future ideas.
• References: This is absolutely necessary.

Supplementary Material is not counted toward your 6-8 page limit. It is optional and is supposed to contain less important results/experiments/etc not critical for understanding the main report.

Example Project Reports

COMPSCI 682 (2017 Fall) projects (only the project titles are available)
COMPSCI 697L (2016 Fall) projects
Stanford CS231n (2015 Winter) projects.

Computing Resources

Amazon offers free AWS credits for students (annually renewable). Using your link provided by the GitHub Student Developer Pack will get you the most free credits.

• UMass is an "AWS member institution", so you are in the higher allowance tier. Use your .edu email and the full school name "University of Massachusetts Amherst" when you register to get the full benefits (a total of $75-$150).
• To get GPUs, use g3 (up to 4 NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs) or p2 (up to 16 NVIDIA K80 GPUs) instances in EC2. Check the pricing first and make your plan accordingly!

Google offers $300 google cloud credits if you sign up for the first time. See the Google Cloud Tutorial.

Collaboration Policy

You can work in teams of 1~2 people. We do expect that projects done with 2 people have more impressive writeup and results than personal projects.

Honor Code

You may consult any papers, books, online references, or publicly available implementations for ideas and code that you may want to incorporate into your strategy or algorithm, so long as you clearly cite your sources in your code and your writeup. However, under no circumstances may you look at another group’s code or incorporate their code into your project.

If you are doing a similar project for another class, you must make this clear and write down the exact portion of the project that is being counted for COMPSCI 682.