Project Logistics

The semester-long project is the largest component of the grade (60%). It is your chance to go deep on one corner of the course material.

Scope

Anything that builds upon or applies optimal transport or flow matching — extending a method to a new problem, or applying an existing method to new data. The method can come from the lectures, from a paper on the reading list, or from somewhere else entirely, and the application can be to any domain you care about. What matters is not the topic but that you have a real question and go after it properly.

What your project has to do

Ask an interesting question. State it plainly and early.
Position it. How novel is this question? It does not have to be novel at all, but you do have to know, and you have to map your question to the closest existing literature.
Describe how you answer it — either with a tool you propose, or by applying something that already exists.
Evaluate how well it works, with actual numbers — using existing benchmarks, or propose your own.
Compare against baselines. You cannot tell how well something you built works without quantitatively comparing it to something sensible: a simple method, an ablation, or a competing method.
State the limitations of what you did, and what you would do next.

Negative results are fine. Sometimes a project does not work out — say so clearly, show the numbers, and explain what you learned. That is a good project.

Deliverables

A poster or a presentation in the final session. The format will be confirmed later in the semester.
A four-page write-up, in the spirit of a NeurIPS workshop abstract: four pages in the NeurIPS LaTeX format, not counting references.

You may add appendices with further details if you need them, and the contribution statement does not count towards the page limit either. The goal, though, is that a reader understands what you did and why it matters from the four pages alone.

Teams

Teams of 2–4 students. Include a short contribution statement in the appendix of the write-up saying who did what.

Milestones

Milestone	Due	Notes
Proposal	Mon Oct 26	One page, showing you have a plan that gets you to the final report.
Write-up & presentation	Mon Dec 14	In the final class.

Submission

Submit the proposal and the final write-up as PDFs on Brightspace.