CMSC 412/612 - Lectures

The lecture schedule will be updated as the term progresses. You can find more details under the Modules tab.

Date	Lecture Topic	Knowledge Check	Academic Papers	Supplemental Media	Homework Due
Tue, Aug 25, 2026	Intro to the Class & Neurosymbolic AI (Module 0) [slides]		Amit Sheth, Kaushik Roy, Manas Gaur, Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence (Why, What, and How) Bikram Pratim Bhuyan, Amar Ramdane-Cherif, Ravi Tomar, T. P. Singh, Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence: a survey
Thu, Aug 27, 2026	Neural Language Models + Attention (Module 1) [slides]		Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le, Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks Alex Graves, Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks	Elle Hunt (The Guardian), Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter Tom Simonite (Wired), The AI Text Generator That's Too Dangerous to Make Public
Fri, Aug 28, 2026	Waitlist Deadline
Mon, Aug 31, 2026	Waitlists Deactivated
Tue, Sep 1, 2026	Transformers (Module 1) [slides]	Visualizing Attention	Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Margaret Mitchell, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, Attention is All You Need Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, Ilya Sutskever, Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners Roy Schwartz, Jesse Dodge, Noah A. Smith, Oren Etzioni, Green AI	Jay Alammar, The Illustrated Transformer
Thu, Sep 3, 2026	Sampling Output (Module 1)		Ari Holtzman, Jan Buys, Li Du, Maxwell Forbes, Yejin Choi, The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, et al., Language Models are Few-Shot Learners Sander Schulhoff, Michael Ilie, Nishant Balepur, Konstantine Kahadze, Amanda Liu, Chenglei Si, Yinheng Li, Aayush Gupta, HyoJung Han, Sevien Schulhoff, Pranav Sandeep Dulepet, Saurav Vidyadhara, et al., The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Brian Ichter, Fei Xia, Ed Chi, Quoc Le, Denny Zhou, Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models	Daniel Jurafsky, James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, Chapter 9: Post-training: Instruction Tuning, Alignment, and Test-Time Compute Kory Mathewson, What is Prompting, Really? Janelle Shane, AI Weirdness (Newsletter)
Fri, Sep 4, 2026	Schedule Adjustment Deadline				Grad Presentation Sign-up Due
Tue, Sep 8, 2026	Types of Foundation Models & Word Embeddings (Module 1)		Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado, Jeffrey Dean, Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space Piotr Bojanowski, Edouard Grave, Armand Joulin, Tomas Mikolov, Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova, BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding Colin Raffel, Noam Shazeer, Adam Roberts, Katherine Lee, Sharan Narang, Michael Matena, Yanqi Zhou, Wei Li, Peter J. Liu, Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer	Daniel Jurafsky, James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, Chapter 6: Vector Semantics and Embeddings
Thu, Sep 10, 2026	Module 1 Paper Presentations (Module 1)
Tue, Sep 15, 2026	Scripts and Events (Module 2)		Roger Schank, Robert Abelson, Scripts Plans Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry Into Human Knowledge Structures (Chapter 3: Scripts) Karl Pichotta, Raymond Mooney, Learning Statistical Scripts with LSTM Recurrent Neural Networks Lara J. Martin, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Xinyu Wang, William Hancock, Shruti Singh, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Event Representations for Automated Story Generation with Deep Neural Nets Nathanael Chambers and Dan Jurafsky, Unsupervised Learning of Narrative Schemas and their Participants Keisuke Sakaguchi, Chandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Niket Tandon, Peter Clark, Yejin Choi, proScript: Partially Ordered Scripts Generation via Pre-trained Language Models Abhilasha Sancheti, Rachel Rudinger, What do Large Language Models Learn about Scripts?
Thu, Sep 17, 2026	Understanding Procedures (Module 2)		Belinda Z. Li, Maxwell Nye, Jacob Andreas, Implicit Representations of Meaning in Neural Language Models Qing Lyu, Li Zhang, Chris Callison-Burch, Goal-Oriented Script Construction Li Zhang, Qing Lyu, Chris Callison-Burch, Reasoning about Goals, Steps, and Temporal Ordering with WikiHow Li Zhang, Qing Lyu, Chris Callison-Burch, Intent Detection with WikiHow Rowan Zellers, Yonatan Bisk, Roy Schwartz, Yejin Choi, SWAG: A Large-Scale Adversarial Dataset for Grounded Commonsense Inference		HW1: Prompting and Fine-tuning
Tue, Sep 22, 2026	Guided Generation (Module 2)		Lili Yao, Nanyun Peng, Ralph Weischedel, Kevin Knight, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan, Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling Hannah Rashkin, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yejin Choi, Jianfeng Gao, PlotMachines: Outline-Conditioned Generation with Dynamic Plot State Tracking Angela Fan, Mike Lewis, Yann Dauphin, Hierarchical Neural Story Generation Hongqiu Wu, Weiqi Wu, Tianyang Xu, Jiameng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Towards Enhanced Immersion and Agency for LLM-based Interactive Drama
Thu, Sep 24, 2026	Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Module 2)		Patrick Lewis, Ethan Perez, Aleksandra Piktus, Fabio Petroni, Vladimir Karpukhin, Naman Goyal, Heinrich Küttler, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Tim Rocktäschel, Sebastian Riedel, Douwe Kiela, Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks Rachel Chambers, Naomi Tack, Eliot Pearson, Lara J. Martin, Francis Ferraro, BERALL: Generating Retrieval-augmented State-based Interactive Fiction Games Zhihua Wen, Zhiliang Tian, Wei Wu, Yuxin Yang, Yanqi Shi, Zhen Huang, Dongsheng Li, GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence	Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, Chapter 11. Information Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Tue, Sep 29, 2026	Module 2 Paper Presentations (Module 2)
Thu, Oct 1, 2026	Search (Module 3)			Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Chapter 2: Intelligent Agents Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Chapter 3: Solving Problems by Searching Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, Chapter 11: Automated Planning Wikipedia, Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver Kory Becker, Artificial Intelligence Planning with STRIPS, A Gentle Introduction	Project Milestone 1: Proposal
Tue, Oct 6, 2026	Classical Planning (Module 3)		Rogelio Cardona-Rivera, Arnav Jhala, Julie Porteous, R. Michael Young, The Story So Far on Narrative Planning Michael Lebowitz, Story-Telling as Planning and Learning Michael Lebowitz, Planning Stories Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, CPOCL: A Narrative Planner Supporting Conflict Mark O. Riedl, R. Michael Young, Open-World Planning for Story Generation R. Michael Young, Stephen Ware, Brad Cassell, Justus Robertson, Plans and planning in narrative generation: a review of plan-based approaches to the generation of story, discourse and interactivity in narratives Julie Porteous, Marc Cavazza, Controlling narrative generation with planning trajectories: The role of constraints Stephen G. Ware, Cory Siler, Sabre: A Narrative Planner Supporting Intention and Deep Theory of Mind Stephen G. Ware, R. Michael Young, Glaive: A State-Space Narrative Planner Supporting Intentionality and Conflict Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Integrating Plot, Character and Natural Language Processing in the Interactive Drama Façade Manu Sharma, Santiago Ontañón, Manish Mehta, Ashwin Ram, Drama Management and Player Modeling for Interactive Fiction Games Stephen G. Ware, Edward T. Garcia, Alireza Shirvani, Rachelyn Farrell, Multi-Agent Narrative Experience Management as Story Graph Pruning Julie Porteous, João F. Ferreira, Alan Lindsay, Marc Cavazza, Automated narrative planning model extension	Narrative Intelligence Lab at the University of Kentucky, Camelot Virtual Environment	HW2: Guided Generation
Thu, Oct 8, 2026	LLM-based Planning (Module 3)		Mihai Polceanu, Julie Porteous, Alan Lindsay, Marc Cavazza, Narrative Plan Generation with Self-Supervised Learning Yi Wang, Qian Zhou, David Ledo, StoryVerse: Towards Co-authoring Dynamic Plot with LLM-based Character Simulation via Narrative Planning Evgeniia Razumovskaia, Joshua Maynez, Annie Louis, Mirella Lapata, Shashi Narayan, Little Red Riding Hood Goes Around the Globe: Crosslingual Story Planning and Generation with Large Language Models Anbang Ye, Christopher Cui, Taiwei Shi, Mark O. Riedl, Neural Story Planning Li Zhang, Peter Jansen, Tianyi Zhang, Peter Clark, Chris Callison-Burch, Niket Tandon, PDDLEGO: Iterative Planning in Textual Environments Cassie Huang, Li Zhang, On the Limit of Language Models as Planning Formalizers
Tue, Oct 13, 2026	Fall Recess - No Class
Thu, Oct 15, 2026	Reinforcement Learning (Module 3)		Pradyumna Tambwekar, Murtaza Dhuliawala, Lara J. Martin, Animesh Mehta, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Controllable Neural Story Plot Generation via Reward Shaping Amal Alabdulkarim, Winston Li, Lara J. Martin, Mark O. Riedl, Goal-Directed Story Generation: Augmenting Generative Language Models with Reinforcement Learning Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mark O. Riedl, Playing Text-Adventure Games with Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Jack Urbanek, Margaret Li, Arthur Szlam, Tim Rocktäschel, Jason Weston, How to Motivate Your Dragon: Teaching Goal-Driven Agents to Speak and Act in Fantasy Worlds Anjie Zhu, Hongcai He, Yongjun Yang, Zetao Zheng, Jie Shao, Hands-Free: Action Abstraction With Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in Text-Based Games
Tue, Oct 20, 2026	Module 3 Paper Presentations (Module 3)
Thu, Oct 22, 2026	Commonsense Reasoning (Module 4)		Robyn Speer, Joshua Chin, Catherine Havasi, ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge Christiane Fellbaum, WordNet Maarten Sap, Ronan Le Bras, Emily Allaway, Chandra Bhagavatula, Nicholas Lourie, Hannah Rashkin, Brendan Roof, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Choi, ATOMIC: An Atlas of Machine Commonsense for If-Then Reasoning Kathy Panton, Cynthia Matuszek, Douglas Lenat, Dave Schneider, Michael Witbrock, Nick Siegel, and Blake Shepard, Common Sense Reasoning – From Cyc to Intelligent Assistant Shane Storks, Qiaozi Gao, Joyce Y. Chai, Commonsense Reasoning for Natural Language Understanding: A Survey of Benchmarks, Resources, and Approaches Gabor Angeli & Chris Manning, NaturalLI: Natural Logic Inference for Common Sense Reasoning Yidan Sun, Qin Chao, Boyang Li, Event Causality Is Key to Computational Story Understanding	Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, AI2 Common Sense leaderboards Yejin Choi, Vered Shwartz, Maarten Sap, Antoine Bosselut, Dan Roth, ACL 2020 Commonsense Tutorial David Gunning, Machine Common Sense Concept Paper
Tue, Oct 27, 2026	Neurosymbolic Knowledge Base Systems (Module 4)		Jena D. Hwang, Chandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Jeff Da, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Antoine Bosselut, Yejin Choi, (COMET-)ATOMIC2020: On Symbolic and Neural Commonsense Knowledge Graphs Peter West, Ronan Bras, Taylor Sorensen, Bill Lin, Liwei Jiang, Ximing Lu, Khyathi Chandu, Jack Hessel, Ashutosh Baheti, Chandra Bhagavatula, Yejin Choi, NovaCOMET: Open Commonsense Foundation Models with Symbolic Knowledge Distillation Nasrin Mostafazadeh, Aditya Kalyanpur, Lori Moon, David Buchanan, Lauren Berkowitz, Or Biran, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, GLUCOSE: GeneraLized and COntextualized Story Explanations		Final Project Milestone 2: Project Progress HW3: Creating Sabre Problems
Thu, Oct 29, 2026	Generating with Ontologies (Module 4)		Martha Palmer, Claire Bonial, Jena Hwang, VerbNet: Capturing English verb behavior, meaning and usage Josef Ruppenhofer, Michael Ellsworth, Miriam R. L. Petruck, Christopher R. Johnson, Collin F. Baker, Jan Scheffczyk, FrameNet II: Extended Theory and Practice Zhongyang Li, Xiao Ding, Ting Liu, J. Edward Hu, Benjamin Van Durme, Guided Generation of Cause and Effect Peter Clark, Bhavana Dalvi, Niket Tandon, What Happened? Leveraging VerbNet to Predict the Effects of Actions in Procedural Text
Mon, Nov 2, 2026	Last day to withdraw from a course
Tue, Nov 3, 2026	Generating Ontologies / World Tracking (Module 4)		Yu Zhu, Rong Pan, Simple Contrastive Learning with Knowledge Graphs for Story Generation Xiangyu Peng, Kaige Xie, Amal Alabdulkarim, Harshith Kayam, Samihan Dani, Mark Riedl, Guiding Neural Story Generation with Reader Models Chenkai Sun, Tie Xu, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji, Incorporating Task-specific Concept Knowledge into Script Learning Lara J. Martin, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds László von Kacsoh, Robin Horst, Ralf Dörner, From Stat Block to Tabletop: A First-Order Logic Framework for Authoring Immersive RPG Combat Encounters Shanshan Huang, Kenny Q. Zhu, Qianzi Liao, Libin Shen, Yinggong Zhao, Enhanced Story Representation by ConceptNet for Predicting Story Endings Peter A. Jansen, A Systematic Survey of Text Worlds as Embodied Natural Language Environments Marc-Alexandre Côté, Ákos Kádár, Xingdi Yuan, Ben Kybartas, Tavian Barnes, Emery Fine, James Moore, Matthew Hausknecht, Ruo Yu Tao, Layla El Asri, Mahmoud Adada, Wendy Tay, and Adam Trischler, TextWorld: A Learning Environment for Text-based Games Matthew Hausknecht, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Xingdi Yuan, Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure Eric Zhou, Shreyas Basavatia, Moontashir Siam, Zexin Chen, Mark O. Riedl, STORY2GAME: Generating (Almost) Everything in an Interactive Fiction Game
Thu, Nov 5, 2026	Module 4 Paper Presentations (Module 4)
Tue, Nov 10, 2026	Putting a Human in the Loop (Module 5)
Thu, Nov 12, 2026	Dialog Systems (Module 5)		Alex Rudnicky, Xu Wei, An agenda-based dialog management architecture for spoken language systems Heng-Da Xu, Xian-Ling Mao, Puhai Yang, Fanshu Sun, Heyan Huang, Rethinking Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: From Complex Modularity to Zero-Shot Autonomous Agent Pei Zhou, Andrew Zhu, Jennifer Hu, Jay Pujara, Xiang Ren, Chris Callison-Burch, Yejin Choi, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, I Cast Detect Thoughts: Learning to Converse and Guide with Intents and Theory-of-Mind in Dungeons and Dragons	Jacob Eisenstein, NLP Chapter 19.3: Dialogue Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing, Chapter 25: Conversation and its Structure	HW4: COMET-ATOMIC Schema
Tue, Nov 17, 2026	Agent-based AI (Module 5)		Jack Urbanek, Angela Fan, Siddharth Karamcheti, Saachi Jain, Samuel Humeau, Emily Dinan, Tim Rocktäschel, Douwe Kiela, Arthur Szlam, Jason Weston, Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Game Wai Man Si, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mark O. Riedl, Telling Stories through Multi-User Dialogue by Modeling Character Relations Shrimai Prabhumoye, Margaret Li, Jack Urbanek, Emily Dinan, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston, Arthur Szlam, I love your chain mail! Making knights smile in a fantasy game world: Open-domain goal-oriented dialogue agents Chris Callison-Burch, Gaurav Singh Tomar, Lara J. Martin, Daphne Ippolito, Suma Bailis, David Reitter, Dungeons and Dragons as a Dialogue Challenge for Artificial Intelligence Anvesh Rao Vijjini, Faeze Brahman, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Towards Inter-character Relationship-driven Story Generation
Thu, Nov 19, 2026	Personas and Roleplaying (Module 5)		Ke Ji, Yixin Lian, Linxu Li, Jingsheng Gao, Weiyuan Li, Bin Dai, Enhancing Persona Consistency for LLMs' Role-Playing using Persona-Aware Contrastive Learning Seungwon Lim, Seungbeen Lee, Dongjun Min, Youngjae Yu, Persona Dynamics: Unveiling the Impact of Persona Traits on Agents in Text-Based Games Silin Gao, Beatriz Borges, Soyoung Oh, Deniz Bayazit, Saya Kanno, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji, Antoine Bosselut, PeaCoK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives Keming Lu, Bowen Yu, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou, Large Language Models are Superpositions of All Characters: Attaining Arbitrary Role-play via Self-Alignment Xuhui Zhou, Zhe Su, Tiwalayo Eisape, Hyunwoo Kim, Maarten Sap, Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The Misleading Success of Simulating Social Interactions With LLMs Lara J. Martin, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl, Improvisational Computational Storytelling in Open Worlds Andrew Zhu, Evan Osgood, Chris Callison-Burch, First Steps Towards Overhearing LLM Agents: A Case Study With Dungeons & Dragons Gameplay Andrew Zhu, Lara J. Martin, Andrew Head, Chris Callison-Burch, CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistants Piotr Mirowski, Kory W. Mathewson, Jaylen Pittman, Richard Evans, Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: Evaluation by Industry Professionals Ann Yuan, Andy Coenen, Emily Reif, Daphne Ippolito, Wordcraft: story writing with large language models Ben Samuel, James Ryan, Adam J. Summerville, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Bad News: An Experiment in Computationally Assisted Performance Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern, Façade: An Experiment in Building a Fully-Realized Interactive Drama
Tue, Nov 24, 2026	Module 5 Paper Presentations (Module 5)
Thu, Nov 26, 2026	Thanksgiving - No Class
Tue, Dec 1, 2026	Final Project In-Class Work				Project Milestone 3: Rough Draft
Thu, Dec 3, 2026	Final Project In-Class Work				HW5: Consistent Personas
Tue, Dec 8, 2026	Final Project In-Class Work
Thu, Dec 17, 2026	Final Project Presentations, 10:30am - 12:30pm				Project Milestone 4: Final Submission