What's Inside
Machine Learning Algorithms
A broad overview of the field of ML.
Introduction to algorithms from a broad range of areas across machine learning—-generative models, support vector machines, tree-based algorithms, neural networks, gradient boosting, and more.
Mathematical Foundations
A rigorous definition of key concepts.
Algorithms derived from first principles using mathematical notation. Rigorous introduction to key concepts in machine learning.
Algorithm Implementations
Every algorithm is implemented in Python.
Executable lecture notes—-Jupyter notebooks that display algorithm definitions and their implementations side-by-side. Over 20 algorithms are implemented from scratch in Python.
General Information
What you will learn
Key elements of this course include:
- Foundational probabilistic principles of deep generative models.
- DGM learning algorithms, and popular model families.
- Applications in domains such as computer vision, NLP, and biomedicine.
Prerequisites
This PhD-level course requires a background in mathematics and programming at the level of Master's level courses.
- Basic knowledge about machine learning from at least one of: CS4780, CS4701, CS5785.
- Basic knowledge of probabilities and calculus: students will work with computational and mathematical models.
- Basic knowledge of deep neural networks (CNNs, RNNs; CS5787). Extensive experience implementing deep neural networks is not required but will be helpful for the class project.
- Proficiency in a programming language (preferably Python) will be helpful for completing the class project if you want to perform an implementation.
Lecture 1: Introduction.
Natural agents excel at discovering patterns, extracting knowledge, and performing complex reasoning based on the data they observe. How can we build artificial learning systems to do the same?
Lecture 2: Introduction to Probabilistic Modeling.
In this lecture, we define probabilistic Models of the Data, compare discriminative models with generative models, and give our audience a first glimpse of deep generative models.
Lecture 3: Autoregressive Models.
We will discuss basic and modern autoregressive models. We will also discuss how recurrent neural networks can work as autoregressive models.
Lecture 4: Maximum Likelihood Learning.
This lecture is all about maximizing the likelihood from data. We will discuss topics such as KL-Divergence and Monte Carlo Estimation, and look at statistical issues and bias/Variance tradeoff in maximum likelihood learning.
Lecture 5: Latent Variable Models.
Latent Variable Models is a very useful tool in our generative models toolbox. We will compare and give examples of shallow and deep latent variable models, and take a look at how to approximate marginal likelihood using variational inference.
Lecture 6: Learning Latent Variable Models.
We continue our exploration in deep latent variable models. In this lecture, we focus on gradient-based optimization of the ELBO and Inference Amortization. We will also explore the variational autoencoder.
Lecture 7: Normalizing Flows.
This lecture contains an in-depth discussion of normalizing flows. We will discuss how to compose simple transformations and volume-preserving transformations.
Lecture 8: Advanced Flow Models.
Now that we have some knowledge in normalizing flows, we can begin discussing advanced flow models using Triangular Jacobians, autoregressive flows, probability distillation, and parallel wavenet.
Lecture 9: Generative Adversarial Networks.
We will now start walking into the direction of likelihood-free learning, and discuss the hot topic of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).
Lecture 10: Advanced Topics in Generative Adversarial Networks.
We will dive deeper into support vector machines by introducing Lagrange duality, and define the dual form of support vector machines.
Lecture 11: Energy-Based Models.
In this lecture, we explain energy-based models, representation, and learning of energy-based models.
Lecture 12: Score-Based Generative Models.
In this lecture, we will explore score-based generative models and their connection to diffusion models.
Lecture 13: Probabilistic Reasoning.
We will explore probabilistic reasoning, which is an approach to machine learning in which we work with structured probabilistic models that encode our understanding of the problem.
Lecture 14: Combining Generative Model Families.
We have covered several useful building blocks: autoregressive, latent variable models, flow models, GANs. Can we combine them in many ways to achieve different tradeoffs?
Lecture 15: Evaluating Generative Models.
Quantitative evaluation of generative models is a challenging task, how should we compare performance of different models?