The idea is that this project report should be a manageable amount of work, but that if you want to turn your project into a paper, everything in the project report will need to be done anyways. If you feel that your project won't fit into this rubric, please talk to me. There are many ways to make contributions to a field!
Length: 4 to 8 pages, not including appendices. Don't be afraid to keep the text short and to the point, and to include large illustrative figures.
Abstract (5 points) that summarizes the main idea of the project and its contributions.
Introduction (5 points) that states the problem being solved and why we might want to solve it.
Figure or diagram (10 points) that shows the overall model or idea. The idea is to make your paper more accessible, especially to readers who are starting by skimming your paper.
Formal description (20 points) of the model / loss function / conjecture. Include at least one of:
A theorem or formally stated conjecture.
Highlight how your model is different from other approaches. This can be done by comparing it to an existing model, perhaps by using another diagram or in words. E.g. if you are proposing a new algorithm that only changes one line in an existing algorithm, highlight that one line, or do a side-by-side comparison.
Related work (20 points) section and bibliography.
Comparison or demonstration (20 points). Include at least one of:
An experiment demonstrating a property that your model has that a baseline model does not. Experiments should also include a description of how you prepared your datasets, how you trained your model, and any tricks you used to get it to work.
Toy data is OK! The point is to help the reader understand why or when we would want to use one approach over another, or to understand something better. Try to summarize the main takeaways.
Limitations (15 points) of your approach.
Conclusions (5 points)
Extra guidelines:
Positive examples: PixelVAE: A Latent Variable Model for Natural Images Your project report doesn't have to be as polished as this, of course!