Policies

AI use and evidence

AI use is permitted and encouraged when it is disclosed, reproducible, and independently verified. Agent output is not evidence by itself.

  • You may use AI throughout the course - brainstorming, literature discovery, coding, debugging, experiment orchestration, and writing assistance - with meaningful use disclosed.
  • Every citation must be checked against a primary source, and every numerical result must trace to an actual experiment, simulator output, formal result, or cited source.
  • AI-generated code must satisfy the same correctness, testing, performance, licensing, and provenance requirements as human-written code.

Academic integrity

Students must follow Columbia academic-integrity policies. Fabricated citations, invented experiments, altered logs, undisclosed result selection, plagiarism, or presenting agent-generated claims as verified evidence are serious violations. When in doubt, disclose the tool, source, assistance, or collaboration.

Collaboration & authorship

Course collaboration does not automatically establish publication authorship. If a project continues after the semester, authorship and ordering follow substantive intellectual and technical contributions, manuscript participation, accountability, and venue policies. Students retain credit for their work; continuation plans should be discussed transparently with the instructor and research mentors.

Accessibility & accommodations

Students who require disability-related accommodations should contact Columbia Disability Services and inform the instructor as early as possible so approved accommodations can be implemented. Please communicate time-sensitive circumstances before deadlines whenever possible.

Resource fairness

Projects report GPU, API, token, simulation, and wall-clock budgets. Grades are not based on access to the largest model or most GPUs. Every project defines a fallback experiment that remains valid if an API, simulator, board, robot, or cloud resource becomes unavailable. Curated starter environments and smoke tests are provided for officially supported directions when feasible.

Late work

Each team may use one 48-hour grace pass on a written milestone, requested before the deadline. The grace pass does not apply to in-class presentations, the final poster, or the final submission. Other extensions require prior approval or documented circumstances.

Changes to the syllabus

This is a first-offering advanced-topics course in a rapidly changing research area. Individual readings, project briefs, guest-speaker scheduling, or detailed deadlines may be updated when new work appears or infrastructure changes. Material changes will be announced clearly and will not retroactively disadvantage students.