ST456      Half Unit
Deep Learning

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Additional requisites:

The course requires some mathematics, particularly basic concepts of linear algebra, and expects a basic knowledge of computer programming, primarily in Python.

This course is about deep learning, covering fundamental concepts of deep learning, neural networks, training and evaluation methods, and neural network architectures designed for tasks such as prediction and generative models for images, sequences, natural language processing, and large language models. The course will cover the following topics:

1. Introduction: course overview
2. Introduction to neural networks: single-layer networks, linear discriminant functions, XOR problem, perceptron, multi-layer perceptron, perceptron learning criteria, perceptron learning algorithm, feedforward neural network architecture
3. Optimisation algorithms: empirical loss function minimisation, gradient descent algorithm, stochastic gradient descent algorithm
4. Advanced optimisation algorithms: adaptive learning rates, momentum, backpropagation, dropout
5. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs): principles and basic operations of convolutional neural networks, LeNet example
6. Modern convolutional neural networks: understanding principles of modern CNN architectures, including AlexNet, VGGNet, NiN, GoogLeNet, ResNet, and DenseNet
7. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs): RNN models, training RNNs, gated RNNs, GRU, LSTM, Deep RNNs, bidirectional RNNs, vector to sequence models using RNNs
8. Sequence to sequence models: machine translation tasks, encoder-decoder architecture, attention mechanisms, transformer, large language models
9. Autoencoders: introduction to autoencoders, linear factor models, PCA and probabilistic PCA, sparse coding, autoencoders, variational autoencoders
10. Generative adversarial networks (GANs): introduction to GANs, GAN architecture and training, Wasserstein GANs, Wasserstain GANs with gradient penalty

20 hours of lectures and 15 hours of classes in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

This course will be delivered through a combination of classes, and lectures and Q&A sessions totalling a minimum of 35 hours across WT.

Students will be expected to produce 8 problem sets in the WT.

• Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville, Deep Learning, MIT Press, 2016, https://www.deeplearningbook.org/
• Aston Zhang, Zachary C. Lipton, Mu Li, and Alexander J. Smola, Dive into Deep Learning, https://d2l.ai/
• TensorFlow – An end-to-end open source machine learning platform, https://www.tensorflow.org/

Continuous assessment (10%) in Winter Term Week 5

Continuous assessment (10%) in Winter Term Week 11

Project (80%)

Two of the problem sets submitted by students weekly will be assessed (20% in total). Each problem set will have an individual mark of 10% and submission will be required in WT Weeks 5 and 11. In addition, there will be a take-home exam (80%) in the form of a group project in which they will demonstrate their ability to develop, train and evaluate neural network algorithms for solving a task of their choice.