CSCI 8945: Advanced Representation Learning

Fall 2025

Advanced Representation Learning cover

Course Information

  • Instructor: Prof. Jin Sun
  • Time: Mon/Wed 13:50 PM - 15:50 PM
  • Location: Building 1002 Geography and Geology, Room 0143
  • Office Hours: Wed 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM or by appointment

Description

Advanced Representation Learning is a course designed to delve deeper into the fundamental concepts of representation learning and its applications. In this class, students will explore various representation learning techniques, including both classical and deep learning methods, and learn how to apply these techniques to solve complex problems in computer vision, natural language processing, audio, and other areas. By working on the research project component of the course, the students will develop novel methods and theories about representation learning and prepare manuscripts describing their findings. By the end of this course, the students will have a solid understanding of the state-of-the-art in representation learning and be able to apply these techniques to solve real-world problems.

Learning Outcomes

  • Demonstrate understanding of machine learning and deep neural network fundamentals.
  • Gain experience deploying deep learning models in computer vision, natural language processing, and audio domains.

(FREE) Textbooks

  • Deep Learning by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville
    http://www.deeplearningbook.org/
  • Dive into Deep Learning by Aston Zhang, Zachary C. Lipton, Mu Li, and Alexander J. Smola
    https://d2l.ai/
  • Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications by Richard Szeliski
    https://szeliski.org/Book/
  • Machine Learning: a Probabilistic Perspective by Kevin Murphy
  • Foundations of Data Science by Avrim Blum, John Hopcroft, and Ravindran Kannan
    https://www.cs.cornell.edu/jeh/book.pdf

Course Schedule

Introduction

Week 1 Aug 13

Topic: Introduction and overview

Week 1 Aug 18

Topic: Data and dimensionality

Week 2 Aug 20

Topic: Dimension reduction, metric learning, PCA, MDS

Week 2 Aug 25

Topic: Structures in data spaces, manifolds, subspaces, sparse coding

Vision

Week 3 Aug 27

Topic: Pixels, 3D points, and cameras

Week 3 Sep 1

Topic: Labor day

Week 3 Sep 3

Topic: Image operations and image semantics

Week 4 Sep 8

Topic: Videos

Week 4 Sep 10

Topic: Image subspaces and manipulations

Language

Week 5 Sep 15

Topic: Representing words and sentences

Week 5 Sep 17

Topic: Language model pretraining

Week 6 Sep 22

Topic: NLP tasks

Week 6 Sep 24

Topic: Zero-shot and in-context learning

Audio

Week 7 Sep 29

Topic: Representing sound

Week 7 Oct 1

Topic: Audio generation and editing

Midterm Oct 6

Graphs

Week 8 Oct 8

Topic: Graphs and neural networks

Week 9 Oct 13

Topic: GNN applications

Multi-modal

Week 9 Oct 15

Topic: Overview of multi-modal learning

Week 10 Oct 20

Topic: Multimodal representation alignment

Advanced topics

Week 10 Oct 22

Topic: Unsupervised learning

Week 11 Oct 27

Topic: Self-supervised learning

Week 11 Oct 29

Topic: Domain adaptation and transfer learning

Week 12 Nov 3

Topic: LLM finetuning

Week 12 Nov 5

Topic: Generative models

Week 12 Nov 10

Topic: AI agent

Week 12 Nov 12

Topic: Time series

Week 13 Nov 17

Topic: Understanding LLM, VLM, etc

Week 13 Nov 19

Topic: Class review and discussion

Project

Project Presentation 1 Nov 24

Week 14 Nov 26

Topic: Thanksgiving break

Project Presentation 2 Dec 1