Assignments
Assessment
| Component | Weight |
|---|---|
| Homework 1 | 20% |
| Homework 2 | 20% |
| Quizzes (best 5 out of 8) | 20% |
| Project | 40% |
Homework 1
Engineering efficient AI systems
You will receive a specification for two AI functions along with a small set of development examples and fixed inference budgets for each. For each of the two, you may implement any AI system that respects the interface and budget, and you will submit the system alongside a short report on its development.
Your score will partly depend on successful completion and discussion of the design and implementation as well as on that the systems' resulting quality-cost trade-offs and generalization to different data distributions and/or underlying LLMs.
Homework 2
Learning from idiosyncratic feedback
You will receive incomplete requirements for a problem and a (simulated) user endpoint that you can query to collect user-specific feedback for a limited number of times. You will build a procedure that decides what feedback to request and when, how to generalize from the feedback into an updated policy, and how to act on new cases after the feedback ends.
Your score will partly depend on successful completion and discussion of the design and implementation as well as your systems' performance and its improvement as more feedback becomes available, plus how the system will generalize to different feedback distributions and/or underlying LLMs.
Project
The course will provide a shared agent project. Students with a strong alternative may instead propose an open-ended project to the course staff. Both paths must pose a clear technical question or test a clear hypothesis, and support their conclusions through careful experiments.
Quizzes
The goal of the quizzes is to test mastery of the fundamental technical ideas and essential system design intuitions from the lecture and the homeworks. This is meant to complement the otherwise very flexible AI usage policies for homework and project development.
Quizzes will be held in class (in roughly 8 of the lectures). Absences will not be granted a special exemption, but your grade will only depend on the best 5 out of 8 quizzes. We choose this format to dramatically lower the pressure compared to a major midterm and to encourage students to stay current with the class conceptually throughout the semester.