🎯 Course Project
A semester-long research project in LLM security.
Table of contents
Overview
Your course project should address an important, interesting open problem related to system security. I’m happy to discuss your project ideas individually and help you refine them.
Projects may be done individually or in pairs (larger groups need to do proportionately more). Your final grade will be based on milestone artifacts and the final report.
Project Timeline
Pre-Proposal Presentation — In class, Feb 13
Give a 5-minute presentation explaining the problem you want to work on, the most important related work, and your tentative approach. This will be an early opportunity to get feedback from the class.
Please use this template for the presentation: Template link
Project Status Presentation — In class, March 18
Each group will give an in-class presentation about the status of their project. You’ll have 5 minutes to speak. This presentation should include:
- Problem statement
- Basic idea and technical insights
- Motivating examples (at least two)
- Prototypes
- Preliminary evaluation results
Final Project Presentation — In class, April 24 and 29
Each group will give an in-class presentation about the status of their project, in the style of a brief conference talk. You’ll have 12 minutes to speak. This presentation should include:
- Problem statement
- Design
- Implementation
- Results
Final Paper — Due on May 4
Your group’s final project report should be written in the style of a workshop or conference submission, similar to the papers we have read this semester. Please include at least:
- An abstract that summarizes your work.
- An introduction that motivates the problem you are trying to solve.
- A related work section that differentiates your contributions.
- Section(s) describing your architecture or methodology.
- Results and/or evaluation section(s), with data/figures to support your claims.
- A brief future work section explaining what is left to do.
- Appropriate citations and references from the literature.
See also: advice on writing technical articles.
The length of your report should not exceed 6 typeset pages, excluding bibliography and well-marked appendices. You may include appendices, but graders are not required to read them. Format your text in two columns, using 10 point Times Roman type on 12 point leading, in a text block of 6.5” by 9”. I strongly encourage you to use Latex. You can use this Overleaf latex template.