DATA 446/622: Generative AI (Spring 2027)
Course information
Instructor: Jindong Wang
Office hours: 11am-12pm, Thursday
Email group: TBA
When: Tuesday & Thursday, 9:30–10:50 a.m. (ET)
Where: TBA
Syllabus
Each class: 55min lecture + 5min buffer + 20min paper presentation. Schedule subject to change.| Week & Date | Topic/Content | Material/Suggested Reading | Note |
| I. Foundations of Generative AI | |||
| 1 2027-01-28 | L01: Introduction | Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models | |
| 2 2027-02-02 2027-02-04 | Tue — L02: VAE Thu — L03: GAN | Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes Generative Adversarial Nets | HW1 starts |
| 3 2027-02-09 2027-02-11 | L04: Diffusion & Flow Matching | DDPM Flow Matching | |
| 4 2027-02-16 2027-02-18 | L05: Autoregressive Models & Transformers | Attention Is All You Need Slides | HW1 due 2027-02-21 |
| II. Large Language Models | |||
| 5 2027-02-23 2027-02-25 | L06: LLM Fundamentals Prompting, inference, evaluation | PromptBench PromptRobust | HW2 starts |
| 6 2027-03-02 2027-03-04 | L07: Pre-training Data, scaling, privacy | Scaling Laws Compute-Optimal LLMs | |
| 7 2027-03-09 2027-03-11 | L08: Post-training & Fine-tuning SFT, DPO, RL/RLHF, LoRA/PEFT | InstructGPT Direct Preference Optimization LoRA | |
| 2027-03-13 – 2027-03-21 | Spring Break | No classes | |
| 8 2027-03-23 2027-03-25 | L09: Security and Alignment Prompt injection, jailbreaks, safety alignment | Indirect Prompt Injection Constitutional AI | |
| III. AI Agents and Reasoning | |||
| 9 2027-03-30 2027-04-01 | L10: AI Agents Planning, multi-agent systems, human oversight | ReAct CompeteAI | HW3 starts Tue HW2 due Thu |
| 10 2027-04-06 2027-04-08 | L11: Reasoning Chain-of-thought, test-time compute, evaluation | Chain-of-Thought Prompting DeepSeek-R1 | |
| 11 2027-04-13 2027-04-15 | L12: Tool Calling & Memory Tools, RAG, persistent memory, safety | Toolformer MemGPT | Project proposal due Thu |
| IV. Multimodal and World Models | |||
| 12 2027-04-20 2027-04-22 | L13: General Multimodal AI Vision, language, audio/video, evaluation | CLIP LLaVA | HW4 starts Tue HW3 due Thu |
| 13 2027-04-27 2027-04-29 | L14: Unified Multimodal Models Joint understanding and generation | BAGEL Janus-Pro | |
| 14 2027-05-04 2027-05-06 | L15: World Models Dynamics, prediction, planning; course review | World Models DreamerV3 | HW4 due Thu |
| 2027-05-13 | Final Project submission | Code + report | Due 12:00 p.m. (noon) |
Grading
Homework (40%): four assignments, 10% each.
Paper reading (20%): one presentation per student, 20 minutes including Q&A.
Final project (40%): code + a 4–6-page report.