DataLab

The course

Work in groups of three on collaborative filtering, generative models and adversarial robustness. For each project, implement an approach, compare it against baselines, and explain what your experiments teach you in a short talk and a report.

Complete your group by Thursday 8 October 2026. Each group must have exactly three students.

Registration & groups — action required

Your TODO

• Complete your name and email in the registration sheet, next to your GitHub ID.
• Check the Find your A1 group page and complete your group of three by Thursday 8 October.

Assessment & submissions

• One presentation per group, per project. A1 and A2: preliminary or final. A3: final only, for everyone. A1/A2 provisional allocation: 19 groups in preliminary and 18 in final. Each presentation lasts 5 minutes. An alarm rings at 5 minutes: finish your talk when it rings. A further 2 minutes per group are reserved for questions and transition. A3 timing will be announced separately.
• One final report per project: one group cover page + at most five pages of content. Optional appendices are not read.
• Code itself is not graded. Your report and talk must explain your methods, experimental protocol, results and limitations. The required code interface must work for automated tests.
• AI is allowed. You must understand, verify and be able to defend everything you submit. Interpret results rather than simply describing them. Expectations increase from A1 to A3.

Files and deadlines

Push slides.pdf and report.pdf to the root of your group repository. Slides are due at 23:59 the day before your presentation; the final report is due at 23:59 the day before the final session, for all groups. Code can be updated until 05:00 on the final-session day. All times are Paris time.

Late submissions will not be accepted. Missing or incorrectly named files will be penalised. Check your pushed PDFs on GitHub before the deadline.

Daily testing

Your repository is pulled and tested each morning around 05:00. Results appear after the runs finish. The DataLab results links will be announced below. These tests provide feedback for your experiments.

Schedule

Current A1 count: 37 groups (7 October). For each of A1 and A2: 5 minutes of presentation per group, with an alarm at 5 minutes. Allow a further 2 minutes for questions and transition. Preliminary: 19 groups, 133 minutes total (2 minutes of margin). Final: 18 groups, 126 minutes total (9 minutes of margin). This allocation is provisional and may change after incomplete groups are reorganised. Group names and running order will be published below.

Sessions generally last three hours. On 22 October and 12 November, allow 2 h 15 for student presentations, a five-minute transition and the last 40 minutes for the next project.

Collaborative filtering

Predict missing ratings using matrix factorisation and alternative recommendation methods. Compare approaches and study hyperparameters, regularisation and computational cost.

Request a preliminary presentation

Email Alexandre with your group name, members and repository link. Requests are subject to confirmation; the final allocation will be published here.

Generative models

Study generation quality and diversity through precision and recall. Design controlled comparisons and explain the trade-offs you observe.

Slides, Classroom 50 invitation and testing platform: coming soon.

Request a preliminary presentation

Email Alexandre with your group name, members and repository link. Requests are subject to confirmation; the final allocation will be published here.

Adversarial robustness

Understand adversarial attacks and assess the robustness of classifiers. Support your conclusions with careful experiments and critical analysis.

Slides, Classroom 50 invitation and testing platform: coming soon.

Final presentations · 3 December

All groups present in the final session. There is no preliminary session for A3.

With 37 groups, five-minute talks plus two minutes for questions and transition would require 4 h 19. The A3 presentation format will be announced separately.

Group list, order and speaking times: to be announced.

MesoNET & Slurm

Prepare your account before the practical introduction on 8 October.

1. Request an account through the MesoNET account procedure, using eduGAIN and your institutional account. Mention IASD.
2. Validate your email, wait for approval, then complete your MesoNET profile before emailing Alexandre.
3. Email Alexandre with your name, MesoNET username and registration email to request access to the IASD project.
4. Prepare your SSH public key. The course introduction contains the SSH setup instructions.

The example includes Python code, configurations, Slurm scripts, the interactive analysis notebook, recorded results and the two trained best.pt models. Start with README.md. You can explore the prepared results without retraining. Download CIFAR-10 separately to train; the larger resume checkpoints and environments are not included.