Class Presentations by Students

Each student is expected to lead a lecture of his/her choice of topics, with the instructor's apporval. All students are required to meet the instructor on one-to-one basis to discuss the lecture materials in detail prior to the presentation. One week before the scheduled presentation, s/he will be expected to submit a draft version of the presentation materials and an initial treatment of the selected topics. The instructor will provide timely feedback about the pre-talk. Reading materials and/or discussion issues will be posted on the course web site, at least one day prior to each lecture. All class members will be expected to have read the listed readings, by the start of the relevant class.

Important Deadlines:

  • By October 5, 2025 - Choose a presentation topic and inform the instructor
  • One week before the presentation - Submit a draft of presentation materials
  • One lecture before the presentation - Hand out copies of reading materials, if not available online
  • One day before the presentation - Post the presentation materials on the web
  • Instructions for posting the lecture notes, reading materials, etc.


    Here is the list of topics to be presented by students in the chronological order:

  • Multiscale Neural Modeling by Arya Teymourlouei (Tues, Oct 28, 2025)
  • Pareto Optimal Deep Reinforcement Learning by Chi Chang Lee (Tues, Oct 28, 2025)
  • Differential Learning Rates for Optimization by Dayal Kalra (Tues, Oct 28, 2025)
  • Differentiable Discrete Learning via Continuous Relaxations by Karan Jain (Thurs, Oct 30, 2025)
  • Differentiable Dynamic Programming by Mihil Sreenilayam (Thurs, Oct 30, 2025)
  • Streaming Algorithms by Eric Wang (Thurs, Oct 30, 2025)
  • Signal Temporal Logic Formulas by Daniel Huber (Tues, Nov 4, 2025)
  • Sparse Attention Methods for Multimodal Transformer Models by Vijaykaarti Sundarapandiyan (Tues, Nov 4, 2025)
  • Differentiable Quantum Architecture Search (DQAS) by Jayden John (Thur, Nov 6, 2025)
  • TextGrad: An Automatic Differentiation Tool for Textual Gradients by Atharv Umap (Thur, Nov 6, 2025)
  • Chain of Thought by Aditya Menachery (Thur, Nov 6, 2025)
  • AI Prompt Generation intersected with Intellectual Property and Copyright Law by Chaitanya Kotikalapudi (Thur, Nov 6-11, 2025)
  • Differentiable Data Augmentation by Raghav Thind (Tues, Nov 11, 2025)
  • Adversarial Attacks on LLMs by Daniel Kiely (Tues, Nov 11, 2025)
  • Differentiable Heterogeneous Quantitative Trading by John Cole (Tues, Nov 11, 2025)
  • Implicit Neural Scene Representations and Differentiable Rendering by Pavan Mantripragada and Naitri Rajyaguru (Thur, Nov 13, 2025)
  • Differentiable Rendering: Inverse Reconstruction and Forward Generation by Wenxuan Wu (Thur, Nov 13, 2025)
  • End-to-End Optimized Optical Metasurfaces for Computational Imaging by Andrew Curran (Tues, Nov 18, 2025)
  • Beyond Geometry: Integrating Semantic Understanding into Differentiable 3D Representations (Gausian Splatting) by Jincheng Yang (Tues, Nov 18, 2025)
  • Differentiable CAD Generation by Haiyang Ying (Tues, Nov 18, 2025)
  • Mesh Parameterization by Jinhong Xia (Thurs, Nov 20, 2025)
  • Differentiable Programming for 3D Reconstruction by Dongki Jung (Thurs, Nov 20, 2025)
  • Differentiable 3D Mesh Reconstruction by Michael Wang (Thurs, Nov 20, 2025)
  • Pose Estimation/Pose Tracking by Kaushal Janga (Tues, Nov 25, 2025)
  • Differentiable Symbolic Music for Violin Fingering Generation by Minsi Hu (Tues, Nov 25, 2025)
  • Learned Feature Uncertainty Systems for Monocular SLAM by Raymond Chen (Tues, Nov 25, 2025)
  • Generalized Visual Odometry by Phuc Nguyen (Tues, Dec 2, 2025)
  • Social Robot Navigation by Phani Kuppa and Laurel Sun (Tues, Dec 2, 2025)
  • Hierarchy of Traffic Models by Nandini Ramachandran (Thur, Dec 4, 2025)
  • Differentiable Control for Autonomous Vehicle Systems by Grace Cai and Joey Lee (Thur, Dec 4, 2025)
  • The Rise of Differentiable Models in Shaping Human Systems by Saanvi Kataria, Krishnan Tholkappian, Peter Hong (Tues, Dec 9, 2025)
  • Differentiable Fluid Simulation by Hee Chan Yoon (Thur, Dec 11, 2025)
  • Differentiable Physics and Soft-Body Manipulation by Rocktim Jyoti Das (Thur, Dec 11, 2025)
  • Neural Geodesic Flows by Mihir Talati (Thur, Dec 11, 2025)

  • Each student presentation will be graded based upon:

  • Advanced Preparation According to the Specification (40%)
  • Analysis and Discussion of the Materials (40%)
  • Style and Clarity of the Actual Presentation (20%)