Schedule (Semester A 2025/2026)

Weekly Schedule

Week	Date	Topics	Notes	Readings	Submissions
1	Sep 04	Course Overview A Brief History of AI with Deep Learning Review of Math	Lecture01A Lecture01B (YouTube) Lecture01C Colab Python Tutorial PyTorch Linear Algebra	EE5438 History of AI with DL Python Basics Python Classes YouTube: Colab Tutorial	-
2	Sep 11	Perceptron and ADALINE Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) MLP Architectures Traditional Activation Functions Loss/Cost Functions Gradient Descent	Lecture02A Lecture02B Colab Housing Regression Colab IRIS Classification	The Evolution of AN Mastering MLPs Activation Functions PyTorch	-
3	Sep 18	Backpropagation Gradient Descent Optimizer Variants Core Techniques for Optimizing Neural Networks Advanced Activation Functions Weight Initializations: Xavier and He Batch Normalization Regularizations	Lecture03A Lecture03B Lecture03C Colab MLP MNIST Colab MLP FMNIST Colab MLP CIFAR-10	Backpropagation PyTorch AutoGrad Classification Metrics GD Optimizer Variants Core Techniques Deep Dive with PyTorch	Project Grouping Due: Sep 20, 2025
4	Sep 25	Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) Evolution of CNN Architectures LeNet, AlexNet, VGGNet, ResNet, etc Transfer Learning CNN-based Computer Vision Apps	Lecture04A Lecture04B Colab LeNet-5 MNIST Colab CNN CIFAR-10 Colab AlexNet CIFAR-10 Colab Transfer Learning Colab Yolo12 (Camera)	Basics of CNNs The Evolution of CNNs AlexNet Paper Two-Stage ODs One-Stage ODs CNN Segmentations YOLO CVPR2016	Project Proposal Due: Sep 27, 2025
5	Oct 2	Tokenization and Word Embeddings Recurrent Neural Networks: RNN, LSTM and GRU RNN Attention Mechanism	Lecture05A Lecture05B Lecture05C Colab Word2Vec Colab LSTM SA	Tokenization Word Embeddings RNN, LSTM, GRU RNN Attention	Assignment 1 Due: Oct 4, 2025
6	Oct 9	Transformers Quiz (10:45pm - 11:45pm)	Lecture06A Colab LSTM Stock Prediction Colab Transformer Stock Prediction	Self-Attention & Transformers Attention Is All You Need	-
7	Oct 16	Large Language Models (LLMs) BERT and its Variants GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, LLaMA BART and T5	Lecture06B Lecture06C Lecture06D Colab BERT Spam Colab LLaMA3-8B Colab NLP Apps	A Brief History of LLMs BERT Unleashed The GPT Revolution BART and T5 DeepSeek-V3	-
8	Oct 23	LLM Decoding Algorithms Prompt Engineering LLM Evaluations (Optional)	Lecture07A Lecture07B Lecture07C Colab RAQ LLaMA3	LLM Decoding Prompt Engineering LLM Evaluations Prompt Engineering Guide	-
9	Oct 30	LLM Optimization Techniques: LLM Quantization Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) Model Distillation	Lecture08A Lecture08B Colab LLM Quantization Colab LLaMA-2 QLoRA	LLM Quantization VRAM Estimation PEFT of LLMs LoRA	Assignment 2 Due: Nov. 1, 2025
10	Nov 6	LLM Preference Alignment: Instruction Tuning Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)		Instruction Tuning RLHF DPO	-
11	Nov 13	Multimodal Models: LLaVA Series (Optional) Reasoning Models: DeepSeek-R1 (Optional) Mid-Term Exam		CLIP and SigLIP LLaVA DeeepSeek-R1	-
12	Nov 20	Project Presentation I	Presentation Schedule: See Project Page	-	-
13	Nov 27	Project Presentation II	Presentation Schedule: See Project Page	-	Assignment 3 Due: Nov 29, 2025
14	Dec 4	Group Project Report Submission	Final Report Template: Template Technical Report	-	Final Report Due: Dec 6, 2025

Important Notes

• Quiz: Week 6 (Oct 9) from 10:45pm - 11:45pm
• Mid-Term Exam: Week 11 (Nov 13)
• Project Presentations: Weeks 12-13 (Nov 20 and Nov 27)
• Final Report: Due Dec 6, 2025

Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong