Detailed Syllabus


Current quarter's videos are available through Panopto.
Course notes are published here.

WeekDateLecture TopicsCourseworkSections
1 Sep 27 Introduction (Slides) Probability and Linear Algebra
2 Oct 02 & Oct 04 Background (Slides) + Autoregressive Models (Slides) HW 1 Released (Oct 02) PyTorch
3 Oct 09 & Oct 11 Maximum Likelihood Learning (Slides) + VAEs (Slides) CNNs, RNNs, Transformers
4 Oct 16 & Oct 18 VAEs (Slides) + Normalizing Flows (Slides) HW 1 due, HW 2 released (Oct 16)
5 Oct 23 & Oct 25 Normalizing Flows (Slides) + GANs (Slides)
Project Proposal: Due Wednesday, October 25, 2023
6 Oct 30 & Nov 01 GANs (Slides) + Energy Based Models (Slides) HW 2 due (Oct 30)
7 Nov 06 & Nov 08 Energy Based Models (Slides) + Score Based Models (Slides) HW 3 released (Nov 06)
Midterm: Day: Nov 10 - Time: 6-9pm - Location: CEMEX (Last names A-L), HEWLETT200 (Last names M-Z)
8 Nov 13 & Nov 15 Energy Based Models (Slides) + Evaluation of Generative Models (Slides)
Project Progress Report: Due Wednesday, November 15, 2023
9 Nov 20 & Nov 22 Thanksgiving Break
10 Nov 27 & Nov 29 Score Based Diffusion Models (Slides) + Discrete Latent Variable Models (Slides) HW 3 due (Nov 27)
11 Dec 04 & Dec 06 Diffusion Models for Discrete Data (Slides)
Poster Presentation: Wednesday, December 6, 2023 from 3:00 pm - 6:00 pm
12 Dec 11 & Dec 13 Finals Week
Final Project Report: Due Monday, December 11, 2023

Additional Reading: Surveys and Tutorials


  1. Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution Yang Song. Blog post on score-based generative models, May 2021.
  2. How to Train Your Energy-Based Models. Yang Song and Diederik P. Kingma. February 2021.
  3. Tutorial on Deep Generative Models. Aditya Grover and Stefano Ermon. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, July 2018.
  4. Tutorial on Generative Adversarial Networks. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, June 2018.
  5. Tutorial on Deep Generative Models. Shakir Mohamed and Danilo Rezende. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, July 2017.
  6. Tutorial on Generative Adversarial Networks. Ian Goodfellow. Neural Information Processing Systems, December 2016.
  7. Learning deep generative models. Ruslan Salakhutdinov. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, April 2015.