Readings
Students are expected to read the corresponding sections about a class’s topic from notes before class as each class will discuss each topic in more detail and address questions about the material.
All readings are from the (in progress) machine learning notes. These are designed to be short, so that you can read every chapter. I recommend avoiding printing these notes, since later parts of the notes are likely to be modified.
Schedule
This schedule may have small changes throughout the semester. Most of the lectures will be whiteboard lectures. The links to pdf files will be dead links, until we get to that lecture. I will upload all slides right before lecture, so you can follow along during class. The whiteboard lecture notes will be uploaded to a shared Google drive of lecture notes.
| Week | Date | Topic | Readings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | January 6, 2026 | Introduction to the Course with a brief refresher of the basics of ML taught in ML I | Assignment #1 released Read Chapters 1-5 from the ml2-notes.pdf |
| 1 | January 8, 2026 | Probability Concepts (multivariate distributions, mixture models, KL divergences), Probability slides and The Goal of Data representations and Separability slides | |
| 2 | January 13, 2026 | Revisiting Linear Regression, with matrices, including generalization error and bias and variance (move to whiteboard, lecture notes in this folder) | |
| 2 | January 15, 2026 | Optimization concepts (Hessians, stepsize algorithms, minibatch sizes, convergence rates) | January 16 the Add/Drop deadline (no fees for change) |
| 3 | January 20, 2026 | Optimization concepts continued | Readings Exercises #1 due on Monday, Jan. 19 Readings Exercises #2: - read Chapters 6-8 |
| 3 | January 22, 2026 | Generalized Linear Models and Multinomial Logistic Regression | Assignment #1 due on Friday, Jan. 23 Assignment #2 released |
| 4 | January 27, 2026 | Constrained Optimization and First in-class quiz |
In-class Quiz 1 about Assignment 1 (must attend class), at start of class |
| 4 | January 29, 2026 | Cross Validation to estimate generalization error and do hyperparameter selection, slides | |
| 5 | February 3, 2026 | Learning data representations: latent variable methods and (probabilistic) PCA | Readings Exercises #2 due Monday, Feb. 2 Readings Exercises #3: - read Chapters 9-11 |
| 5 | February 5, 2026 | Learning data representations with neural networks | Assignment #2 due on Friday, Feb. 6 Assignment #3 released |
| 6 | February 10, 2026 | Regularization and inductive biases in neural networks, and leveraging ideas from latent representations and second in-class quiz |
In-class Quiz 2 about Assignment 2 |
| 6 | February 12, 2026 | Finish learning data representations | |
| 7 | February 16-20, 2026 | No classes, Reading Week | |
| 8 | February 24, 2026 | Starting with a simple generative model: mixture models | Readings Exercises #3 due Monday, Feb 23 Readings Exercises #4: - read Chapters 12-15 |
| 8 | February 26, 2026 | Generative models with learned representations: variational auto-encoders and the ELBO, and start Midterm Review | |
| 9 | March 3, 2026 | Finish Midterm Review and do practice midterm | Midterm is about topics from Chapter 1-11 |
| 9 | March 5, 2026 | Midterm in-class for the whole 90 minutes | |
| 10 | March 10, 2026 | Optimizing the ELBO, conditonal VAEs and Evaluating Generative Models | |
| 10 | March 12, 2026 | Missing Data | Assignment #3 due on Friday, March 13 Assignment #4 released |
| 11 | March 17, 2026 | Uncertainty estimation: Bayesian regression, Gaussian processes and bootstrap ensembles and third in-class quiz |
Readings Exercises #4 due Monday, March 16 Readings Exercises #5: - read Chapters 16-18 |
| 11 | March 19, 2026 | Finish uncertainty estimation | |
| 12 | March 24, 2026 | Learning on sequential (temporal) data: history, RNNs and transformers | |
| 12 | March 26, 2026 | Finish learning on sequential data | |
| 13 | March 31, 2026 | Generalization error beyond iid | |
| 13 | April 2, 2026 | Finish topics | Assignment #4 due on Friday, April 3 |
| 14 | April 7, 2026 | Fourth In-class quiz 4 and Guest Lecture | Readings Exercises #5 due Monday, April 6 |
| 14 | April 9, 2026 | Final Review | |
| Final | April 22, 9 am, in the Main Gym | Final Exam | 2 hours, Four-page cheat sheet allowed (2 pages front and back) |