Graduate Project

Introduction

The graduate project is offered only to students enrolled in CS289A. Other students are welcome to work on a final project, but their work will not be graded or counted towards their final grades.

Teammates

You must work in groups of two or three students. To give everyone experience collaborating on a machine learning project, individual projects are not allowed.

Project Topic

The purpose of the project is to explore topics in machine learning that build upon course concepts. The project theme may be anything related to machine learning techniques discussed in this class. We will use Ed Discussion to share ideas, brainstorm project topics, and provide feedback. You’re encouraged to propose ideas that align with your own interests, but do not propose a project you have already completed as part of your research or another course. Otherwise, the project is fairly open-ended, and we are eager to help you identify a reasonable project that is engaging and useful for your learning.

Milestones and Grading Breakdown

Deliverable Due Date (11:59 PM PT) Grading Weight
Project Proposal Fri, Oct 17 5%
Progress Report Fri, Nov 7 10%
First Draft of Paper Wed, Nov 26 20%
Peer Review Fri, Dec 5 10%
Final Report Fri, Dec 12 40%
Final Video Fri, Dec 12 15%

Project Proposal

Each group will submit a two-page project proposal, detailing the scope of their project and a rough timeline of what they plan to accomplish. To receive full credit, your proposal should contain the following:

  • Background:
    • What is the application domain or field of research?
    • What is the overarching goal of your project?
  • Data/Resources:
    • What data do you intend to work with?
    • Describe the features, labels, number of samples, etc.
    • Is this data publicly available? How will you access it?
    • Are there any other resources needed for your project (e.g., compute)? Do you have access to these?
  • Timeline:
    • How will each team member contribute to the project?
    • What do you plan to accomplish each week? Include internal milestones in addition to our required ones.

Progress Report

Each group will submit a 1-2 page report of what they have accomplished and their plans for the remainder of the project. To receive full credit, your progress report should include the following:

  • Outline:
    • Before submitting the progress report, each group should create a shared document to be used for their final report. You are encouraged to use Overleaf Professional, but Google Docs or any other method for collaborative writing is fine.
    • Within this document, create an outline for your report. Please see the section below on the “First Draft of Paper” for expectations regarding what is to be included in your report.
    • Provide a shareable link to this document in your progress report.
  • Progress:
    • Students should demonstrate substantial progress towards the goals outlined in their original project proposal.
    • Significant deviations from the original proposal should be discussed with course staff before submitting the progress report.
    • Describe where you are in your proposed timeline. Include a summary of what each team member has contributed and any preliminary results.
    • You are encouraged to share your code (preferably with a link to a GitHub repo) to demonstrate your progress.
  • Goals:
    • Include an updated timeline for the remainder of your project, following the guidelines for the project proposal.

First Draft of Paper

Each group will submit the first draft of their paper to be reviewed by other teams. This should be a refined paper that has already gone through internal review within the group. You must follow the ICML paper guidelines for your submission (except we don’t require double-blind reviewing). You are expected to adhere to the style guidelines and page requirements. Please note that we will not grade submissions that are longer than the maximum 8 pages. To receive full credit, your paper should contain the following:

  • Abstract – A complete summary of your paper.
  • Related Work – Discussion of other papers related to your own.
  • [Optional] Background – Additional information needed to understand your work.
  • Methods/Approach – A thorough description of what you did.
  • Evaluation/Analysis – Discussion of your experiments and visualizations of your results.
  • Conclusions – Summary of the key takeaways, as well as a discussion of limitations and areas for future work.

You do not need to follow this structure exactly and can use section headings/subheadings that make the most sense for your work, but all of this information should be captured in your paper to receive full credit.

Peer Review

Each student will review the paper of one other group and submit a one-page review, following the ICML reviewer guidelines, specifically the Main Track Reviewer Form Instructions. To receive full credit, you should answer the questions under:

  • Summary
  • Claims and Evidence
  • Relation to Prior Works
  • Other Aspects
  • Questions for Authors

You can ignore the sections on Ethical Issues, Code of Conduct Acknowledgement, and Overall Recommendation.

Final Report

Each group will revise their paper based on all the reviews they received and submit a polished version of their final report. This report should follow the same guidelines discussed for the First Draft of Paper.

In addition to your final report, you must submit a brief response to your reviewers, addressing reviewers’ comments and questions. To receive full credit on your final report, you should clearly indicate how you responded to reviewer feedback, including changes you made and those you chose not to make.

Final Video

Along with the final report, each group will submit a 2-3 minute video summarizing their project. To receive full credit:

  • The video should be clear and understandable, describing everything you think is important about your project (motivation, background, techniques, results, etc.).
  • The video needs to be self-contained: any CS 289A student should be able to understand what you did (at least at a high level) without consulting any other materials.
  • The video can be at most 3 minutes long. Note that this is a strict requirement; we will not grade a video that is more than 3 minutes long.
  • There is no requirement on the format of your video. You can make the video as simple as slides with a voice overlay or as fancy as you want.

Project Policies

AI Usage Policy

You may use AI tools to brainstorm ideas, write code, debug, find related work, summarize existing work, etc. However, you are fully responsible for your own work, and all of the written work must be entirely written by you, including the peer review. Please note that GenAI tools, like ChatGPT, tend to hallucinate when finding and citing related work. You must ensure that your paper is not in violation of UC Berkeley’s Academic Integrity policy.

Late Policy

The project proposal must be submitted on time to ensure that you receive timely feedback and have an appropriate project for this course. To enable a smooth peer review process, the first draft and peer review feedback must also be submitted on time. We are unlikely to grant extensions on any of these milestones, so please contact us only for exceptional circumstances.

All other milestones (the progress report, final report, and final video) will incur a 10% daily penalty after the due date, up to a maximum of two days. Submissions are rounded to the nearest day (e.g., 2 minutes late counts as 1 day late).