Schedule

Course Schedule

The tentative calendar for Fall 2026. Class meets Tuesday/Thursday, 10:15–11:44 AM, WLNT 401B. All assignments are due Monday at midnight.

For topic-by-topic content, readings, and key concepts, see Topics & Readings. For the final project deliverables in detail, see Final Project. Each project hand-in is assigned in place of that week’s homework and is due the following Monday at midnight.

Week	Content	Dates	Notes
0	Course Introduction; Deep Learning Review	Tue Aug 25, Thu Aug 27
1	NLP and Attention Mechanisms	Tue Sep 1, Thu Sep 3
2	Computer Vision and Segmentation	Tue Sep 8, Thu Sep 10
3	VLMs, Multimodal Models, Diffusion Models	Tue Sep 15, Thu Sep 17
4	MCP, Harnesses; Agentic AI	Tue Sep 22, Thu Sep 24	Project: Team Formation due
5	Midterm 1	Tue Sep 29	no class Thurs: Fall Break
6	Mechanistic interpretability and Steering	Tue Oct 6, Thu Oct 8
7	Distillation; Efficient Architectures: MoE and Quantization	Tue Oct 13, Thu Oct 15	Project: Proposal (no homework this week); due Mon Oct 19
8	Reinforcement Learning: Policy Optimization	Tue Oct 20, Thu Oct 22
9	Reinforcement Learning: Off-Policy RL and Self-Play	Tue Oct 27, Thu Oct 29	Project: Midpoint check-in (no homework this week)
10	Speech and Audio Processing	Tue Nov 3, Thu Nov 5
11	LLMs for Research; Agentic AI — Orchestration & Evaluation	Tue Nov 10, Thu Nov 12
12	Video Understanding and Generation; Course Wrap-up	Tue Nov 17, Thu Nov 19	Project: Draft Report (no homework this week); due Mon Nov 23; Thurs: Midterm 2
13	Thanksgiving Break	Tue Nov 24 , Thurs Nov 26	no class either day (optional meetings on Tuesday)
14	Final Project Presentations	Tue Dec 1, Thu Dec 3
—	Final Report due	Mon Dec 7	(no class)