This assignment is due on Wednesday, May 07 2025 at 11:59pm PST.

Starter code containing Colab notebooks can be downloaded here.

Setup

Please familiarize yourself with the recommended workflow before starting the assignment. You should also watch the Colab walkthrough tutorial below.

Note. Ensure you are periodically saving your notebook (File -> Save) so that you don’t lose your progress if you step away from the assignment and the Colab VM disconnects.

While we don’t officially support local development, we’ve added a requirements.txt file that you can use to setup a virtual env.

Once you have completed all Colab notebooks except collect_submission.ipynb, proceed to the submission instructions.

Goals

In this assignment you will practice writing backpropagation code, and training Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks. The goals of this assignment are as follows:

  • Implement Batch Normalization and Layer Normalization for training deep networks.
  • Implement Dropout to regularize networks.
  • Understand the architecture of Convolutional Neural Networks and get practice with training them.
  • Gain experience with a major deep learning framework, PyTorch.
  • Understand and implement RNN networks. Combine them with CNN networks for image captioning.

Q1: Batch Normalization

In notebook BatchNormalization.ipynb you will implement batch normalization, and use it to train deep fully connected networks.

Q2: Dropout

The notebook Dropout.ipynb will help you implement dropout and explore its effects on model generalization.

Q3: Convolutional Neural Networks

In the notebook ConvolutionalNetworks.ipynb you will implement several new layers that are commonly used in convolutional networks.

Q4: PyTorch on CIFAR-10

For this part, you will be working with PyTorch, a popular and powerful deep learning framework.

Open up PyTorch.ipynb. There, you will learn how the framework works, culminating in training a convolutional network of your own design on CIFAR-10 to get the best performance you can.

Q5: Image Captioning with Vanilla RNNs

The notebook RNN_Captioning_pytorch.ipynb will walk you through the implementation of vanilla recurrent neural networks and apply them to image captioning on COCO.

Submitting your work

Important. Please make sure that the submitted notebooks have been run and the cell outputs are visible.

Once you have completed all notebooks and filled out the necessary code, you need to follow the below instructions to submit your work:

1. Open collect_submission.ipynb in Colab and execute the notebook cells.

This notebook/script will:

  • Generate a zip file of your code (.py and .ipynb) called a2_code_submission.zip.
  • Convert all notebooks into a single PDF file.

If your submission for this step was successful, you should see the following display message:

### Done! Please submit a2_code_submission.zip and a2_inline_submission.pdf to Gradescope. ###

Note: When you have completed all notebookes, please ensure your most recent kernel execution order is chronological as this can otherwise cause issues for the Gradescope autograder. If this isn’t the case, you should restart your kernel for that notebook and rerun all cells in the notebook using the Runtime Menu option “Restart and Run All”.

2. Submit the PDF and the zip file to Gradescope.

Remember to download a2_code_submission.zip and a2_inline_submission.pdf locally before submitting to Gradescope.