Project Milestone

DUE MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3 AT 11:59PM.

Table of contents

Overview

The milestone report serves as a mid-project progress check. The goal is to document your progress, justify any changes to your original plan, and build a solid foundation for your final report.

Your report should cover the following:

  1. Progress Check in
    • Work Completed: Describe the work you have accomplished so far (e.g., baseline implementations, dataset processing, index setup, core algorithm development). Note which group member was responsible for each major task or component.
    • Progress Assessment: Are you on track with your original timeline? If behind schedule, explain why and describe your concrete plan to get back on track (adjusted effort allocation, revised timeline, etc.)
  2. Evolving Methodology
    • Updated Plan: Provide an updated version of your “Proposed Approach” section from the proposal. Highlight all changes from the original proposal. In your LaTeX document, you are encouraged to use the changes package for this (\added{…}, \deleted{…}).
    • Justification of Changes: Following the updated plan, briefly justify each significant change. Explain how your discoveries, complications, or successes led to these adjustments.
  3. Risk Assessment and Mitigation
    • Identify the top 1-2 potential risks to completing your project successfully (e.g., “our final approach may not significantly outperform the baselines on the full dataset”, “integrating different components may take longer than expected”).
    • For each risk, propose a concrete mitigation strategy. What is your backup plan if the risk materializes?
  4. Preliminary Results (Optional) Present any preliminary results you have gathered. This could include initial performance comparisons (e.g., latency, recall@k) of your in-progress solution against the baselines on a subset of the data. Simple tables or graphs are highly encouraged. Discuss what these early results imply for your project.

Option 2: Replicating Research

Your report should cover the following:

  1. Progress Check in
    • Work Completed: Describe the work you have accomplished so far (e.g., setting up environment and baselines, replication efforts). Note which group member was responsible for each major task or component.
    • Progress Assessment: Are you on track with your original timeline? If behind schedule, explain why and describe your concrete plan to get back on track (adjusted effort allocation, revised timeline, etc.)
  2. Evolving Methodology
    • Updated Plan: Provide an updated version of your “Replication Plan” section from the proposal. Highlight all changes from the original proposal. In your LaTeX document, you are encouraged to use the changes package for this (\added{…}, \deleted{…}).
    • Justification of Changes: Following the updated plan, justify each significant change. Explain how unforeseen complications (e.g., ambiguous descriptions in the paper, differences in setup) or learnings forced you to deviate from your original plan. For example, “The paper did not specify the learning rate, so we added a new step to perform a hyperparameter search, as documented here.”
  3. Potential Risks and Mitigation Plan
    • Identify the top 1-2 potential risks to completing your project successfully (e.g., “we may be unable to fully replicate the key results due to missing details”).
    • For each risk, propose a concrete mitigation strategy. For instance, “If we cannot replicate Figure 5, we will focus on replicating Table 2 and documenting the reasons for the discrepancy in Figure 5.”
  4. Preliminary Results (Optional) Present any preliminary results from your replication effort. It’s perfectly acceptable to show partial replications or results that don’t yet match the paper. Discussing discrepancies is a key part of the learning process. Use simple tables or graphs where appropriate.

Submission and Grading

Please reuse the LaTeX template from your project proposal.

Submit a PDF with your project proposal on canvas. Only one submission is required per group.

This assignment is worth 5% of your grade. We will evaluate on the basis of clarity of this report, demonstrated progress toward project goals, and quality of planning and risk assessment.

Note that:

  • Preliminary results are optional but encouraged
  • Failed experiments or negative results are acceptable and even valuable if properly documented and analyzed
  • Being behind schedule is not penalized if the team provides an honest assessment and concrete recovery plan