Assignments
This course has a strong practical component, consisting of three graded assignments:
Theory and Practice of Tabular and Deep reinforcement learning (individual)
Deep Policy-based, REINFORCE and Actor Critic (group 0f 3)
Deep policy-based, PPO and SAC (group of 3)
Together, your average grade for these three assignments determines 50% of your final grade (see Grading).
Grading scheme & Template
You can find the full grading scheme here.
Use template for AS 1, 2 and 3 for your reports with a page limit of 6.
Assignment PDF & Code
You get the assignment pdf and starting code from Brightspace (under Assignments).
Note: you first need to enroll in a groups for the specific assignment to actually see the Assignment appear in your list.
Start your assignment early (at least come to every practical session!). From previous years we know you need this time to explore the assignment, and you will not be able to finish it if you start in the last week.
Rules
Make sure you stick to the below rules for the course report:
Template: Write your report in this Latex template.
Do not alter the style file or page limits.
You do not need to follow all the specific formatting advise in the template (since it is very detailed and meant for a conference). We only use the template to make sure your reports are 1) neat, 2) comparable and 3) do not get too long. Therefore, simply enter your names and student numbers as authors, think of a nice title, and include you text, figures and tables as you would usually do in a latex document. You may include an abstract, but this is not mandatory.
Note that you need to replace \bibliography{example_paper} on line 545 of the template with \bibliography{main} if you want to use the main.bib file for your references (this is a slight inconsistency in the public template).
Page limit: Your report has a page limit of 6 pages (excl. references). We will not grade any material beyond the page limit.
You may include additional results/explanation, but put them in an Appendix. (It is up to the grader to read these: you are in principle graded based on your main report.)
Groups: You take the second and third assignment in groups of three.
If you can't find a partner for your team, try to get in touch with eachother through the Brightspace forum.
Contributions: Make sure you indicate (at the end of your report) what each team member contributed.
Important: you should do all work together, and learn together. Splitting the assignment is not allowed.
If we ask you to explain your assignment, both of you should be able to explain all aspects.
Code: Include your code with the report.
Make sure your code runs from the command line.
When you use new packages, indicate your dependencies.
Deadline
Each assignment has a clear deadline for handing in (see Schedule). You submit your assignment through the Brightspace page of the course.
Being late: We deduct a full point of your assignment grade for every full day (24 hours) that you hand it in too late.
Yes, this indeed means that the first 23:59 hours late are for 'free'.
For example: Your submission, which scores a grade of 8.0, was submitted 60 hours after the deadline. We deduct 2 points for being more than 48 hours (2 days) late, and you receive a 6.0.
Debugging
The teaching assistants are there to answer content questions, and (unfortunately) not to help you debug your code. This is something your really need to learn to do yourself.
For example, we cannot help you with questions like: "I get this error message" or "My code is not working, can you find my mistake?".
Remember: coding is not only about typing actual code, but also about verifying what your code is effectively doing. When you ask a question, make sure you understand what your code is doing.
Use a debugging tool (or at least a print statement) to find out what a variable stores, how it changes during algorithm execution, whether that matches your expectations of the algorithm, etc.