Schedule (Semester A 2026/2027)

Weekly Schedule

Week	Date	Topics	Notes	Readings	Submissions
1	Sep 1	Course Overview and History of DL Review of Math	Lecture01A (YouTube) Lecture01B Colab Python Tutorial PyTorch Linear Algebra	History of AI with DL Python Basics Python Classes YouTube: Colab Tutorial	-
2	Sep 8	Artificial Neurons Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) MLP Architectures Traditional Activation Functions Loss/Cost Functions Gradient Descent	Lecture02A Lecture02B Colab House Regression Colab IRIS Classification	The Evolution of AN Mastering MLPs Activation Functions PyTorch	-
3	Sep 15	Backpropagation Gradient Descent Optimizer Variants Core Model Design and Training Techniques Advanced Activation Functions Weight Initializations: LeCun, Xavier and He BatchNorm, LayerNorm, RMSNorm Regularizations: L1/L2, Dropout, Early Stop Data Augmentation	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 18, 2026
4	Sep 22	Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) LeNet-5, AlexNet, VGGNet, ResNet, etc Transfer Learning CNN Apps in Computer Vision (Optional) Object Detection, Segmentation, etc	Lecture04A Lecture04B Colab LeNet-5 FMNIST Colab CNN CIFAR-10 Colab AlexNet CIFAR-10	Basics of CNNs The Evolution of CNNs AlexNet Paper Colab Yolo12 (Camera) YOLO CVPR2016	Project Proposal Due: Sep 25, 2026
5	Sep 29	Tokenization and Word Embeddings Recurrent Neural Networks: Vanilla RNN, LSTM and GRU Attention Mechanism in RNNs Bahdanau Attention and Luong Attention	Lecture05A Lecture05B Lecture05C Colab Word2Vec Colab LSTM SA Colab LSTM Stock Prediction	Tokenization Word Embeddings RNN, LSTM, GRU RNN Attention	Assignment 1 Due: Oct 2, 2026
6	Oct 6	Transformers Quiz (8:45pm - 9:45pm)	Lecture06A Colab Transformer for Translation	Transformers Explained Attention Is All You Need	-
7	Oct 13	Large Language Models (LLMs) BERT and its Variants BART and T5 GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3, ChatGPT	Lecture07A Lecture07B Lecture07C Colab BERT Spam Colab GPT-2	BERT Unleashed The GPT Revolution BART and T5 A Brief History of LLMs
8	Oct 20	LLM Decoding & Prompt Engineering LLM Evaluations (Optional)	Lecture08A Lecture08B Colab RAG Qwen2.5-3B	LLM Decoding Prompt Engineering LLM Evaluations	-
9	Oct 27	Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) LLM Quantization	Lecture09A Lecture09B Colab LLM Quantization Colab LoRA Finetuning of QWen2.5-0.5B	LLM Scaling Laws LLM Quantization VRAM Estimation PEFT of LLMs	Assignment 2 Due: Oct 30, 2026
10	Nov 3	Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback Reasoning LLMs Advanced LLM Architectures (Optional)		Instruction Tuning RLHF, DPO, GRPO Reasoning LLMs LLM Architectures	-
11	Nov 10	Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) (Optional) Mid-Term Exam		Multimodal Models Diffusion Models	-
12	Nov 17	Project Presentation		-	-
13	Nov 24	Project Presentation		-	Assignment 3 Due: Nov 27, 2026
14	Dec 1	Group Project Report Submission	Final Report Template: Template Technical Report	-	Final Report Due: Dec 4, 2026

Important Notes

• Quiz: Week 6 (Oct 6) from 8:45pm - 9:45pm
• Mid-Term Exam: Week 11 (Nov 10)
• Project Presentations: Weeks 12 and 13 (Nov 17 and Nov 24)
• Final Report: Due Dec 1, 2026

Department of Electrical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong