Generative Modeling
Complete self-designed course on Generative Modeling! (May - Aug 2023)
Motivation
In this self-designed slow-paced course, I teach Generative Modeling from the fundamentals. The focus is on building ideas from the ground up which help understanding the concepts in greater detail and alleviate any fear in reading new papers of the field!
Course Design & Content
I designed and executed the course under the PMRF Student Lecture Series scheme of ISSS, which provides a platform to connect with interested students. The Course Flyer had the schedule and the planned course content. All the lectures were held online in Microsoft Teams which allowed anyone around the world to attend and easy recording capabilities. Every lecture was for two hours.
I discuss basics of probability and motivate ideas like KL divergence. This builds the foundation for going through the VAE formulation. I discuss concepts like Multivariate Gaussians and their properties to get a clearer understanding of VAEs. I then talk about some issues in VAEs and some solutions explored in the literature. After a quick overview of GANs, I discuss diffusion models from the ground up. Lastly, I motivate the intuition behind energy-based models and other generative models.
All the lectures were recorded and uploaded in the Generative Modeling playlist of my YouTube teaching channel.