Microsoft

Core Neural Architectures & Generative Models

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Microsoft

Core Neural Architectures & Generative Models

 Microsoft

Instructor: Microsoft

Included with Coursera PlusLearn more

Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Advanced level

Recommended experience

1 week to complete
at 10 hours a week
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace
Gain insight into a topic and learn the fundamentals.
Advanced level

Recommended experience

1 week to complete
at 10 hours a week
Flexible schedule
Learn at your own pace

What you'll learn

  • Design and train CNN architectures, including ResNet and ConvNeXt with transfer learning and data augmentation pipelines.

  • Implement LSTM, GRU, and Temporal Convolutional Networks for sequence classification and time series forecasting.

  • Engineer Transformer attention blocks from scratch and fine-tune BERT and ViT models using Hugging Face Transformers.

  • Implement and evaluate generative models including VAEs, GANs, and Diffusion pipelines using Hugging Face Diffusers.

Details to know

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Assessments

21 assignments¹

AI Graded see disclaimer
Taught in English

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Build your Machine Learning expertise

This course is part of the Microsoft Deep Learning Engineering with Azure Professional Certificate
When you enroll in this course, you'll also be enrolled in this Professional Certificate.
  • Learn new concepts from industry experts
  • Gain a foundational understanding of a subject or tool
  • Develop job-relevant skills with hands-on projects
  • Earn a shareable career certificate from Microsoft

There are 10 modules in this course

Move beyond basic convolutional layers by designing advanced network topologies. Learners explore, analyze, and implement residual connections, compound scaling, and depthwise separable convolutions to build efficient, state-of-the-art vision models deployable via Dual-Path cloud workflows.

What's included

1 video3 readings1 assignment

Maximize model performance on custom datasets with minimal compute. Learners compare frozen backbone feature extraction versus full fine-tuning, and integrate robust augmentation pipelines using a hybrid suite of TorchVision transforms and Albumentations to prevent overfitting within an enterprise Dual-Path cloud architecture.

What's included

1 video1 reading3 assignments

Overcome the vanishing gradient problems of standard Recurrent Neural Networks. You will implement LSTMs and GRUs equipped with memory gates, and engineer PyTorch data pipelines utilizing padding and packing to efficiently process variable-length sequences on GPU hardware within a Dual-Path environment architecture.

What's included

1 video3 readings1 assignment

Move beyond standard recurrent models to engineer massive-scale time series forecasters. You will explore Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) and hybrid architectures, and analyze precomputed telemetry to select the optimal model based on latency and accuracy trade-offs.

What's included

1 video1 reading3 assignments

Deconstruct the core engine of modern large language models. This module works through the self-attention mechanism mathematically and programmatically, implements causal masking, and evaluates how shifting from recurrence to attention allows for massive parallelization.

What's included

1 video2 readings2 assignments

Move from theory to application. This module builds enterprise-grade fine-tuning pipelines using Hugging Face to adapt foundation models—including BERT and ViT—to domain-specific natural language processing and computer vision tasks on Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML).

What's included

1 video1 reading3 assignments

Dive into the mathematics of generative modeling. You will implement VAEs to learn structured latent spaces, and then tackle the notorious instability of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) using advanced regularization techniques.

What's included

1 video2 readings2 assignments

Transition to the architecture driving modern image synthesis. You will fine-tune Stable Diffusion models using DreamBooth via the Hugging Face Diffusers library, and learn how to quantitatively evaluate generative quality using FID and LPIPS metrics.

What's included

1 video1 reading3 assignments

Learn to accelerate computer vision and sequence modeling workflows using generative AI utilities. You will write prompts to programmatically generate and validate custom Albumentations transform chains, automatically design packed variable-length LSTM topologies, and evaluate synthetic dataset expansions for training robustness.

What's included

3 readings2 assignments

Synthesize your advanced architectural skills to engineer a unified multi-domain deep learning system. You will implement robust object-oriented custom neural modules that combine modern vision blocks, dynamic packed-sequence encoders, and transformer attention matrices into scalable, cloud-ready training routines monitored via MLflow.

What's included

2 readings1 assignment

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Instructor

 Microsoft
424 Courses2,859,128 learners

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Microsoft

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¹ Some assignments in this course are AI-graded. For these assignments, your data will be used in accordance with Coursera's Privacy Notice.