Section outline

  • The official language of the course is English: all materials, references and books are in English.

    Lecture slides will be made available here, together with suggested readings.

    Date Room Topic References Additional Material
    1 18/02/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE Introduction to the course: motivations and aim; course housekeeping (exams, timetable, materials); introduction to modern pattern recognition applications
    (slides)





    219/02/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINESignal processing: timeseries; time domain analysis (statistics, correlation); spectral analysis; fourier analysis.
    (slides)


    3
    25/02/2021
    (14.00-15.30)
    ONLINE
    Image processing: feature descriptors (color histograms, SIFT), spectral analysis, feature detectors (edge, blobs and segments).
    (slides)

    Additional Readings
    [1,2] Two high-level surveys on visual feature extraction and representation
    4
    26/02/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Generative and Graphical Models - Part 1: probability refresher; graphical model representation; directed and undirected models
    (slides)
    [BRML] Ch. 1 and 2 (Refresher)
    [BRML] Sect. 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3.1
    (conditional independence)

    5
    04/03/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Generative and Graphical Models - Part 2: Bayesian networks; Markov networks; conditional independence and d-separation.
    [BRML] Sect. 3.3 (Directed Models)
    [BRML] Sect. 4.1, 4.2.0-4.2.2 (Undirected Models)
    [BRML] Sect. 4.5 (Expressiveness)
    Software


    05/03/2021
    (11-13)

    NO LECTURE DUE TO GRADUATION COMMITTEE (WILL BE RECOVERED)


    6
    11/03/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Hidden Markov Models  - Part 1:  learning in directed graphical models; forward-backward algorithm;  generative models for sequential data
    (slides)
    [BRML] Sect. 23.1.0 (Markov Models)
    [BRML] Sect. 23.2.0-23.2.4 (HMM and forward backward) 
    Additional Readings
    [3]  A classical tutorial introduction to HMMs
    7
    12/03/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Hidden Markov Models - Part 2: EM algorithm, learning as inference, Viterbi Algorithm
    [BRML] Sect. 23.2.6 (Viterbi)
    [BRML] Sect. 23.3.1-23.3.4 (EM and learning)

    8
    18/03/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Markov Random Fields: learning in undirected graphical  models; conditional random fields; pattern recognition applications
    (slides)
    [BRML] Sect. 4.2.2, 4.2.5 (MRF)
    [BRML] Sect. 4.4 (Factor Graphs)
    [BRML] Sect. 5.1.1 (Variable Elimination and Inference on Chain) 
    [BRML] Sect. 9.6.0, 9.6.1, 9.6.4, 9.6.5 (Learning in MRF/CRF)
    Additional Readings
    [4,5] Two comprehensive tutorials on CRF ([4] more introductory and [5] more focused on vision)
    [6] A nice application of CRF to image segmentation

    Sofware
    Check out pgmpy: it has Python notebooks to introduce to working with MRF/CRF
    9
    19/03/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Boltzmann Machines: bridging neural networks and generative models; stochastic neuron; restricted Boltzmann machine; contrastive divergence
    (slides)
     [DL] Sections 20.1 and 20.2
    Additional Readings
    [7] A clean and clear introduction to RBM from its author

    Sofware
    Matlab code for Deep Belief Networks (i.e. stacked RBM) and Deep Boltzmann Machines.
    10
    25/03/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Bayesian Learning: non-parametric models; variational learning
    (slides)
    [BRML] Sect. 11.2.1 (Variational EM), 20.4-20.6.1  (LDA)
    Additional Readings
    [8] LDA foundation paper
    [9] A gentle introduction to latent topic models
    [10] Foundations of bag of words image representation

    Sofware

    11
    26/03/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Bayesian Learning: sampling methods - Guest lecture by Daniele Castellana
    (
    slides)
    [BRML] Sect. 27.1-27.3, 27.4.1, 27.6.2

    M1
    30/03/2021
    (13.30-16.00)
    ONLINE
    Midterm 1 discussions


    12
    08/04/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Convolutional Neural Networks (part I): introduction to CNN; basic CNN elements
    [DL] Chapter 9
    Additional Readings
    [11-15] Original papers for LeNet, AlexNet, VGGNet, GoogLeNet and ResNet.
    13
    09/04/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Convolutional Neural Networks (part II): CNN architectures for image recognition; convolution visualization; advanced topics (deconvolution, dense nets); applications and code
    (slides)
    [DL] Chapter 9
    Additional Readings
    [16] Complete summary of convolution arithmetics
    [17] Seminal paper on batch normalization
    [18] CNN interpretation using deconvolutions
    14
    15/04/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Deep Autoencoders: introduction to the deep learning module, sparse, denoising and contractive AE; deep RBM
    (slides)
    [DL] Chapter 14, Sect 20.3, 20.4.0 (from 20.4.1 onwards not needed)
    Additional Readings
    [19] DBN: the paper that started deep learning
    [20] Deep Boltzmann machines paper
    [21] Review paper on deep generative models
    [22] Long review paper on autoencoders from the perspective of representation learning
    [23] Paper discussing regularized autoencoder as approximations of likelihood gradient
    15
    16/04/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Gated Recurrent Networks: deep learning for sequence processing; gradient issues; long-short term memory; gated recurrent units; generative use of RNN
    (slides)
    [DL] Sections 10.1-10.3, 10.5-10.7, 10.10, 10.11
    Additional Readings
    [24] Paper describing gradient vanish/explosion
    [25] Original LSTM paper
    [26] An historical view on gated RNN
    [27] Gated recurren units paper
    [28] Seminal paper on dropout regularization

    Sofware

    16
    22/04/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Gated Recurrent Networks II


    17
    23/04/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Deep randomized neural networks - Guest lecture by Claudio Gallicchio
    (slides)


    18
    29/04/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Learning in Structured Domain I: Recursive Neural Networks - Guest lecture by Alessio Micheli
    (slides)


    19
    30/04/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Learning in Structured Domain II: Neural Networks for Graphs - Guest lecture by Alessio Micheli
    (slides)


    M2
    03/05/2021
    (13.30-17)
    ONLINE
    Midterm 2 discussions


    20
    06/05/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    An introduction to Tensorflow and Keras: python; numpy, tensorflow, keras;
    (Coding practice by Federico Errica)
    (slides)


    21
    07/05/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    PyTorch – neural networks in Python: python; pytorch; RNN
    (Coding practice by Antonio Carta)
    (slides)


    22
    13/05/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Advanced Recurrent Architectures: sequence-to-sequence;  attention models; multiscale network; memory networks; neural reasoning.
    (slides)


    [DL] Sections 10.12, 12.4.5
    Additional Readings
    [29,30] Models of sequence-to-sequence and image-to-sequence transduction with attention
    [31,32] Models optimizing dynamic memory usage (clockwork RNN, zoneout)
    [33] Differentiable memory networks
    [34,35] Neural Turing Machines and follow-up paper on pondering networks
    [36] Transformer networks: a paper on the power of attention without recurrence
    23
    14/05/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Generative and Unsupervised Deep Learning: explicit distribution models; variational autoencoders; adversarial learning.
    (slides)
    [DL] Sections 20.9, 20.10.1-20.10.4    
    Additional Readings
    [37] PixelCNN - Explict likelihood model
    [38] Tutorial on VAE
    [39] Tutorial on GAN (here another online resource with GAN tips)
    [40] Wasserstein GAN
    [41] Tutorial on sampling neural networks

    Sofware

    24
    20/05/2021
    (14-16)
    ONLINE
    Continual learning. Guest lecture by Vincenzo Lomonaco


    25
    21/05/2021
    (11-13)
    ONLINE
    Final lecture: course wrap-up; research themes; final projects; exam modalities
    (slides)


     M3  07/06/2021
    (10-13.30)
    ONLINE
    Midterm 3 discussions