ECE 498 AI Systems & Engineering · Fall 2026

Machine Problems

Coursework consists of four machine problems (MP0–MP3).
This page contains links to MP documents and their due dates.

Machine Problems

Machine Problems

MP documents will be linked here as they are released.

Machine Problems and checkpoints with release and due dates
Assignment Description Release Due
Team-upForm MP teamsTue Aug 25Mon Sep 7
MP0Prerequisites (PyTorch / CUDA)Tue Aug 25Mon Sep 14
MP1Pre-trainingTue Sep 8Mon Oct 5
MP1 CP1LLM ArchitectureTue Sep 8Mon Sep 21
MP1 CP2LLM Training LogicTue Sep 22Mon Sep 28
MP1 CP3Pre-training & EvaluationTue Sep 29Mon Oct 5
MP2Post-trainingTue Oct 6Mon Nov 2
MP2 CP1Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)Tue Oct 6Mon Oct 12
MP2 CP2Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)Tue Oct 13Mon Oct 19
MP2 CP3Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF)Tue Oct 20Mon Oct 26
MP2 CP4Open-ended ExtensionTue Oct 27Mon Nov 2
MP3Inference engineTue Nov 3Thu Dec 10
MP3 CP1Inference engine basicsTue Nov 3Mon Nov 9
MP3 CP2PagedAttention, chunked prefill, prefix cachingTue Nov 10Mon Nov 30
MP3 CP3Inference parallelisms, speculative decoding, FlashAttention, CUDA graphThu Nov 19Thu Dec 10

MPs typically release Tuesday after class; they are due Monday AoE before class.