FALL 2024
1) September 9th 2024 - Agenda Discussion
2) September 16th 2024 - Refresher on Reinforcement Learning, Deep RL, and Policy Gradient Methods (presented by Dr. Pingali)
- Recommended reading: Barto and Sutton Chapter 13
- Recommended materials: DeepRL Bootcamp Lecture 4A; DeepRL Bootcamp Lecture 4B; David Silver Lecture 7; Pieter Abbeel Lecture 3
- Background materials: Dr. Pingali’s BOOST’24 Lectures on ML/RL with Demos
- Slides
3) September 23rd 2024 - Advanced Policy Gradient Methods (presented by Lain)
- Recommended reading: Barto and Sutton Chapter 13
- Recommended materials: DeepRL Bootcamp Lecture 5; David Silver Lecture 7; Pieter Abbeel Lecture 3
- Slides
4) September 30th 2024 - Gradient Computation in MLPs and KANs (presented by Dr. Pingali and Lain)
- Recommended background materials: Neural Networks and Learning Machines, Haykin, 3rd edition; Dr. Pingali’s Bertinoro Talk on Backpropagation
- Slides
5) October 7th 2024 - Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) (presented by Dr. Pingali)
6) October 14th 2024 - Effective Reinforcement Learning through Evolutionary Surrogate-Assisted Prescription (presented by Lain)
- Recommended reading: Effective Reinforcement Learning through Evolutionary Surrogate-Assisted Prescription by Francon et al. 2020
- Slides
7) October 21st 2024 - Attention Variants and Optimization (presented by Kaizhao)
- Recommended reading: Attention paper
- Slides
8) October 28th 2024 - ML for Compiler Optimization (presented by Dr. Sadayappan)
9) November 4th 2024 - Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) (presented by Lain)
- Recommended readings: Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback (Ouyang et al. 2022); Learning to summarize from human feedback (Stiennon et al. 2020); Deep Reinforcement Learning from Human Preferences (Christiano et al. 2023)
- Slides
10) November 11th 2024 - Graph Neural Networks (GNN) (presented by Sicong Che and Kate Zhang)
11) November 18th 2024 - Evolution and Applications to Systems by Dr. Risto Miikkulainen
- Recommended background: Dr. Miikkulainen on the Lex Fridman Podcast (Neuroevolution and Evolutionary Computation)
12) November 25th 2024 - Learning Directed Operating System (LDOS) (presented by Dr. Rossbach)