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Yan Yan and Gady Agam

An introduction to the field of deep learning, including neural networks, convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, transformers, generative models, neural network compression and transfer learning. This course will benefit students’ careers as a machine learning engineer or data scientist.

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What's inside

Syllabus

Module 1: Neural Networks
Welcome to Deep Learning! In module 1, we will give an introduction to deep learning. Deep learning is a branch of machine learning which is based on artificial neural networks. It is capable of learning complex patterns and relationships within data. Particularly, we will discuss feed-forward deep neural network. We will also discuss backpropagation – the way to optimize deep neural networks.
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Traffic lights

Read about what's good
what should give you pause
and possible dealbreakers
Teaches deep learning and machine learning methods used for object recognition
Instructed by experts in deep learning and machine learning
Covers foundational material in deep learning, including foundational and advanced topics
Suitable for learners with no prior knowledge in deep learning
Provides practical, applicable knowledge and skills
May require access to additional resources, which could incur costs

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Reviews summary

Deep learning: practical and comprehensive foundation

According to learners, this 'Deep Learning' course provides a highly practical and comprehensive introduction, proving especially beneficial for aspiring machine learning engineers and data scientists. Many students highlight the instructor's exceptional clarity in explaining complex topics such as Transformers and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The course is frequently praised for its up-to-date content and numerous hands-on coding exercises, which significantly enhance understanding and real-world application. While largely providing a strong foundational understanding, some students noted that certain areas, like optimization methods or advanced model implementation, could benefit from greater mathematical rigor or more in-depth practical guidance, occasionally prompting the need for supplementary study.
Course's mathematical depth may not satisfy all learners.
"I found the lectures to be quite superficial in certain areas, particularly when dealing with the mathematical underpinnings. As someone with a strong math background, I was hoping for more rigor."
"The course provides a strong foundation, making complex topics accessible even for someone new to the field, but might lack the deep mathematical explanations some experienced learners seek."
Offers valuable coding exercises for applying theoretical knowledge.
"The hands-on coding exercises were invaluable, especially the ones involving PyTorch."
"An excellent course for anyone looking to understand deep learning from a practical standpoint. The focus on applications and real-world scenarios was a major plus for me."
"I found this course incredibly useful for leveling up my deep learning skills. The content is up-to-date and practical."
Covers a wide range of current and essential deep learning topics.
"The course content is very current and relevant to today's ML landscape."
"The course covers a wide range of cutting-edge topics, from foundational neural networks to modern generative models and even model compression."
"The coverage of transformers and diffusion models is a huge plus. The content is up-to-date and practical."
The instructor excels at simplifying complex deep learning concepts.
"The instructor explains complex topics like Transformers and GANs with incredible clarity..."
"The professor's enthusiasm shines through, and their ability to simplify difficult concepts is remarkable."
"Their explanations of backpropagation and LSTMs were the clearest I've encountered."
Forum discussions could be more active for timely support.
"My only minor complaint is that the forum discussions were not very active, making it harder to get questions answered quickly."
"I felt that the discussion on practical tips (Module 3) could have been expanded. More real-world scenarios and common pitfalls would be beneficial."
Some topics may require external resources for deeper understanding.
"My only minor critique is that some explanations, especially for optimization methods, could have been a bit more in-depth. I had to look up external resources for a complete understanding."
"I found myself needing to supplement with other materials to fully grasp the nuances."
"Good overview, but not enough depth. I needed more guidance on implementing complex models from scratch."

Activities

Be better prepared before your course. Deepen your understanding during and after it. Supplement your coursework and achieve mastery of the topics covered in Deep Learning with these activities:
Review 'Deep Learning' by Yoshua Bengio
Build a strong foundation by reading the seminal textbook on Deep Learning
View Deep Learning on Amazon
Show steps
  • Read and summarize Chapter 1: Introduction
  • Read and complete exercises for Chapter 2: Feedforward Neural Networks
  • Read and summarize Chapter 3: Convolutional Neural Networks
Solve practice problems on backpropagation
Strengthen your foundation in how neural networks learn
Browse courses on Backpropagation
Show steps
  • Solve 10 practice problems on backpropagation
  • Debug your code or approach with a peer or TA
Attend weekly study group for discussion and Q&A
Deepen your understanding through peer collaboration and exchange of ideas
Browse courses on Neural Networks
Show steps
  • Regularly attend study group sessions
  • Actively participate in discussions and ask questions
  • Prepare questions or topics to present to the group
Five other activities
Expand to see all activities and additional details
Show all eight activities
Review 'Recurrent Neural Networks' by Alex Graves
Expand your knowledge of RNNs and their applications
Show steps
  • Read and summarize Chapter 1: Introduction to RNNs
  • Read and complete exercises for Chapter 2: LSTM Networks
  • Read and summarize Chapter 3: Applications of RNNs
Build a neural network model for image classification
Gain practical experience in applying neural networks to real-world problems
Browse courses on Neural Networks
Show steps
  • Collect or find a dataset of images
  • Build a neural network model using a framework like PyTorch or TensorFlow
  • Train and evaluate your model
  • Present your results to peers or instructors for feedback
Follow a tutorial on Generative Adversarial Networks
Gain exposure to advanced and emerging techniques in Deep Learning
Show steps
  • Find a comprehensive tutorial on GANs
  • Follow the tutorial step-by-step and implement your own GAN model
  • Share your results with the community or apply them to a project
Contribute to an open-source deep learning library
Gain practical experience and network with the deep learning community
Browse courses on Deep Learning
Show steps
  • Identify a suitable open-source project
  • Fork the project and make a contribution
  • Submit a pull request and engage with the project maintainers
Start a personal project on neural network compression
Enhance your understanding of advanced topics and develop your problem-solving abilities
Browse courses on Deep Learning
Show steps
  • Define the scope and goals of your project
  • Research existing techniques and algorithms
  • Implement and test your own compression methods
  • Evaluate and compare your results against baselines

Career center

Learners who complete Deep Learning will develop knowledge and skills that may be useful to these careers:

Reading list

We've selected 43 books that we think will supplement your learning. Use these to develop background knowledge, enrich your coursework, and gain a deeper understanding of the topics covered in Deep Learning.
Provides a comprehensive overview of deep learning, including convolutional neural networks. It is written by three leading researchers in the field and is suitable for both beginners and experienced practitioners.
Co-authored by creators of the Hugging Face ecosystem, the revised edition serves as the definitive practitioner manual for training, fine-tuning, and deploying encoder-decoder and decoder-only transformers. Readers dissect multi-head self-attention, tokenization pipelines, and model quantization through production PyTorch code.
Demystifies transformer internals by guiding engineers step by step through coding a GPT-style architecture in pure PyTorch without relying on high-level library abstractions. Covers causal self-attention, positional embeddings, layer normalization, pretraining loops, and instruction fine-tuning on consumer hardware.
Renowned for intuitive visual pedagogy, Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst illustrate how representation and generation transformers process tokens, contextual embeddings, and dense retrieval vectors. Ideal for developers seeking rigorous geometric intuition alongside practical semantic search and fine-tuning workflows.
A recent book by a renowned author in the field, this text offers a comprehensive introduction to the central ideas underpinning deep learning. It's intended for both newcomers and those with experience. It focuses on enduring concepts and is structured for self-study or as a textbook, with an emphasis on practical value over abstract theory.
Bridges foundational transformer architecture with production systems engineering, examining how attention bottlenecks, KV-cache memory footprints, and context length constraints govern real-world deployment. Equips practitioners to evaluate foundation models, architect retrieval-augmented pipelines, and optimize inference latency.
This paper introduces the variational autoencoder (VAE), a deep learning model that can generate new data from a given dataset. VAEs are a powerful and versatile model that can be used to generate a wide variety of data, including images, text, and music.
Expands beyond text-only models to demonstrate how Vision Transformers (ViT), CLIP, and multimodal architectures unify image patch embeddings with sequence attention. Includes hands-on notebooks covering BERT, GPT-4, Hugging Face pipelines, and cross-modal representation learning.
Establishes the mathematical bedrock of sequence modeling, optimization, and representation learning that motivated the shift from recurrent networks and sequence-to-sequence attention to modern transformers. Indispensable for mastering backpropagation, regularization, and probabilistic deep learning.
Offers a mathematically lucid, modern graduate treatment of dot-product self-attention, multi-head projections, positional encodings, and residual connections. Connects transformer mechanics directly to graph neural networks, diffusion models, and overparameterized optimization dynamics.
This textbook covers both classical and modern models in deep learning, placing an emphasis on understanding the relationship between traditional machine learning and neural networks. It includes discussions on various network architectures and advanced topics. Written for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners, it serves as a solid reference with an application-centric view. It is suitable as a textbook.
Walks through an end-to-end LLMOps pipeline for customizing and serving transformer models in production. Details parameter-efficient fine-tuning with LoRA and QLoRA, preference alignment with DPO, dataset curation, and high-throughput vLLM inference serving.
Takes a code-first approach to deep learning using the fastai library, which is built on PyTorch. It focuses on practical applications and achieving state-of-the-art results with minimal code. It's well-suited for coders who want to quickly get into building and deploying deep learning models. It's a great resource for practical implementation.
Provides a comprehensive guide to deep learning using the PyTorch framework. It covers building, training, and tuning neural networks with PyTorch tools. It's a practical book suitable for those who want to learn deep learning specifically with PyTorch and understand its core concepts.
Synthesizes transformer internals with enterprise software architecture, breaking down attention variants, tokenization trade-offs, domain fine-tuning, and KV-cache inference optimization. Equips engineers to build dependable LLM pipelines using retrieval-augmented generation, structured outputs, routing cascades, and systematic failure mitigation.
Provides a practical guide to generative adversarial networks (GANs), a powerful deep learning model for generating new data. It is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to learn more about GANs and how to use them in practice.
While not solely focused on neural networks, this book provides a comprehensive foundation in pattern recognition and machine learning, with significant coverage of neural network models. It classic text known for its rigorous approach and is suitable for advanced undergraduate or graduate students. It serves as an excellent reference for the mathematical and statistical basis of neural networks.
Covers machine learning and deep learning with Python, specifically utilizing PyTorch and Scikit-Learn. It provides a good balance of theory and practical implementation, including neural network concepts. It's suitable for those who want to learn both traditional machine learning and deep learning using these popular libraries.
Connects language transformers with multimodal generative architectures through practical code written by core Hugging Face contributors. Shows practitioners how cross-attention conditioning, encoder embeddings, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning bridge text, vision, and audio synthesis workflows.
Delves into the specifics of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), covering architectures from simple RNNs to more advanced gated units like LSTMs. It's suitable for readers who want to understand the theory and applications of RNNs for sequential data. It provides a focused look at a key type of neural network.
Catalogs the architectural taxonomy of over sixty transformer variants across efficient sparse attention, cross-lingual pretraining, time-series forecasting, and protein folding. Combines formal architectural diagrams with comparative empirical benchmarks and PyTorch case studies.
Guides practitioners from foundational self-attention mathematics and query-key-value projections to fine-tuning modern Hugging Face transformer families. Covers encoder-only, decoder-only, and multimodal variants alongside practical scaling, quantization, and inference optimization techniques.
Places autoregressive GPT models and encoder-decoder transformers in direct dialogue with variational autoencoders, GANs, and denoising diffusion models. Shows practitioners how attention mechanisms power both text generation and conditioning layers inside modern image synthesis systems.
Focuses on the application of recurrent neural networks to time-series forecasting. It is written by two leading researchers in the field of time-series forecasting.
Focuses on deep reinforcement learning, a field that heavily utilizes neural networks. It covers applying modern RL methods with deep neural networks. It's suitable for those interested in the intersection of neural networks and reinforcement learning and provides practical implementations.
Investigates how reward modeling, representation bias, and inverse reinforcement learning shape the safety and ethics of large neural sequence models. Provides crucial sociotechnical context for engineers aligning pretrained transformers with human intent.
Provides a comprehensive overview of Bayesian methods, a powerful tool for machine learning. Bayesian methods are used in a wide variety of machine learning applications, including generative models.
Focuses on the application of recurrent neural networks to speech recognition. It is written by two leading researchers in the field of speech recognition.
Provides a good introduction to the fundamentals of deep learning, covering essential concepts related to neural networks. It's suitable for those who want a solid understanding of the core principles before moving on to more advanced topics or specific applications.
Examines how cross-encoders, bi-encoders, ColBERT late interaction, and dense passage retrieval transformed modern search engines. Essential reading for engineers building neural information retrieval and high-precision reranking stages for RAG architectures.
Is known for its beginner-friendly approach to deep learning and neural networks, focusing on building networks from scratch using Python and NumPy. It aims to provide intuitive understanding through coding examples. This book is suitable for those new to the field and programming, offering a gentle introduction before tackling more complex texts.
This is another classic text by Bishop, focusing specifically on neural networks for pattern recognition. While older, it provides a strong theoretical foundation in the subject. It's a valuable reference for understanding the earlier developments and mathematical basis of neural network models.
Provides a broad overview of the history and development of neural networks and deep learning, discussing key milestones and applications. It offers a historical perspective on the field and its impact. It's valuable for understanding the context and evolution of neural networks.
Provides a detailed look at supervised learning in feedforward neural networks. It's a classic reference for this specific architecture, covering theoretical aspects and practical considerations. While it predates the deep learning era, it offers in-depth knowledge on the foundational feedforward networks.
Provides a comprehensive overview of deep learning, including convolutional neural networks. It is written by two leading researchers in the field and is suitable for both beginners and experienced practitioners.
Provides a comprehensive overview of machine learning, including convolutional neural networks. It is written by a leading researcher in the field and is suitable for both beginners and experienced practitioners.
Provides a comprehensive overview of deep learning for natural language processing, including convolutional neural networks. It is written by a leading researcher in the field and is suitable for both beginners and experienced practitioners.

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