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Reading CMU 07-380

Continuing from 07-280, a lecture-by-lecture reading of CMU 07-380’s first-offering 26 lectures — from logic and planning through diffusion models — with the release status of homework and project materials noted throughout.

CMU 07-380 Fall 2026 Overview: 26 Lectures from Logic and Planning to Diffusion, HW and Project Not Yet Fully Released

07-380 Fall 2026 is the first offering of CMU's new AI II: 26 lectures from logic, planning and optimization to probabilistic graphs and generative systems. As of the 2026-09-29 course site, the Lec1–9 slides, PR1–6 notes, Rec1–5 (with solutions) and HW1–3 are public, and this site now has 14 lecture-by-lecture guides for them. Slides after Lec10, HW4–7 and the final project are not out yet, so the course as a whole is still A2.

CMU 07-380 Lecture 1 Guide: Introduction, and What AI & ML II Adds After 07-280

07-380 Lec1 has no algorithms. It sets up three things: the working definition that intelligence means doing well on a task under uncertainty, a bubble diagram that color-codes 07-280 topics against the new 07-380 topics, and a grading scheme with quizzes at 55%, no final exam, and a final project. Off-campus readers can use it to place the other 25 lectures.

CMU 07-380 Lecture 2 Guide: Logical Agents, Proving a Square Safe with Model Checking, DPLL and Forward Chaining

Lec2 turns 'is this square safe?' in Minesweeper and Wumpus World into an entailment question: KB ⊨ α exactly when KB ∧ ¬α is unsatisfiable. Three ways to answer it: TT-ENTAILS, which enumerates every model; DPLL, which adds early termination, pure symbols and unit clauses to backtracking; and forward chaining, which accepts only definite clauses and runs in linear time. Resolution sits in the appendix, marked out of scope.

CMU 07-380 HW1 Guide: Logic and the Hybrid Wumpus Agent, Logical Inference Plus A* Planning

The HW1 programming assignment turns Lec2's entailment into a Pacman take on the Wumpus agent. Q1–Q2 warm up with Expr and pycosat. Q3–Q5 write the PKE percept rule, build the KB, and use two SAT calls to decide SAFE, NOT_SAFE or UNSURE. Q6–Q7 use the provided A* helpers to build an exploration agent and a three-tier hybrid agent. The starter code and local autograder are public; the Gradescope online questions are CMU-only. No solutions here.

Reading CMU 07-380 Lecture 3: Classical Planning, PDDL, State-Space Search, and Relaxation Heuristics

07-380 Lec3 replaces propositional successor-state axioms with STRIPS actions (pre/add/del sets), which turns planning back into state-space search. When that search is too large, GraphPlan lets actions run in parallel and never deletes facts, and delete relaxation drops delete effects entirely, yielding the heuristics behind FF and Fast Downward.

Reading CMU 07-380 Lecture 4: Motion Planning, RRT Samples Its Way Through Continuous Space

The second half of 07-380 Lec4 moves planning into continuous configuration space. States can no longer be enumerated, so RRT samples a random point, extends the nearest tree node a short step toward it, and checks the whole segment for collisions. RRT is probabilistically complete but not optimal; RRT* uses tree path costs to pick a better parent and rewire neighbors, so the path converges to optimal as samples grow.

Reading CMU 07-380 HW2: Classical and Motion Planning, from Robot-Cook PDDL to RRT* to Graphing LPs

07-380 HW2 has three parts. The programming assignment has you write PDDL for a pancake-cooking robot, solve it optimally with unified-planning and Fast Downward, then implement RRT and RRT* in rrt.py (Q2–Q7). The written part covers GraphPlan, one LP modeling problem, and two LP graphing problems. A Gradescope online component is CMU-only. This guide covers structure, prerequisites, and running the local autograder; it contains no solutions.

Reading CMU 07-380 Lecture 5: Linear Programming, and Why the Optimum Sits at a Vertex of the Feasible Region

07-380 Lec5 turns the Diet Problem from words into min cᵀx s.t. Ax ⪯ b, then draws it: each constraint is a half-plane, the cost is a direction, and cost contours are perpendicular to c. Push a contour in the −c direction until it last touches the feasible region and you always hit a vertex, so solvers only need the intersections of constraint boundaries. Vertex enumeration checks them all; simplex walks greedily from one vertex to a better neighbor.

Reading CMU 07-380 Lecture 6: Integer Programming, Relax to an LP and Branch and Bound

07-380 Lec6 adds one constraint to an LP, x ∈ ℤᴺ, and the vertex solution may no longer be an integer. Searching the integer points near the LP solution is not guaranteed to work either. The fix: drop the integer constraint (relaxation) to get an LP lower bound, split on a fractional coordinate into xᵢ ≤ floor and xᵢ ≥ ceil, and keep every subproblem in a priority queue ordered by LP objective. The first all-integer solution popped is optimal.

Reading CMU 07-380 Lecture 7: Low Rank Optimization, PCA's Reconstruction Error, Projected Variance, and LoRA

07-380 Lec7 frames PCA as low-rank optimization: approximate the data with a matrix of rank at most r. For a unit vector v, each point's reconstruction error equals ‖x‖² minus the squared projection length, so minimizing reconstruction error and maximizing projected variance are the same problem. Lagrange multipliers show the answer is an eigenvector of the covariance matrix, which you can also read straight off the V in the SVD. The site lists the LoRA paper as reading; its ΔW = BA applies the same low-rank idea to weight updates.

CMU 07-380 Lecture 8 Guide: MAP, How Priors Enter Estimation and Why That Equals Regularization

Lecture 8 swaps MLE's argmax p(D|θ) for argmax p(θ|D). The prior p(θ) multiplies the likelihood, and after taking the negative log it becomes an extra term in the objective. A trick coin shows data overwhelming the prior, a Beta prior estimates a click rate, and Gaussian and Laplace priors on linear-regression weights turn into L2 and L1 regularization.

CMU 07-380 HW3 Guide: Optimization, Writing Your Own LP Solver and Branch and Bound, With PCA and MAP on Paper

HW3 has three parts. The programming part has you build an LP solver by vertex enumeration, stack branch and bound on top of it for integer programs, and formulate three word problems. The written part covers integer programming by hand, the ethics of Amazon's delivery routing, PCA via SVD, and a proof that a Laplace prior equals L1. It is due 10/1, so this guide explains structure and concepts only, with no solutions.

CMU 07-380 Lecture 9 Guide: Probabilistic Generative Models, Naive Bayes and Gaussian Discriminant Analysis

Lecture 9 stops learning p(y|x) directly. Instead it learns the class prior p(y) and the class-conditional p(x|y), then inverts them with Bayes rule. The price is stronger assumptions; the payoff is the ability to generate new data and more stability with little data. Naive Bayes uses conditional independence to make the parameters estimable, GDA uses multivariate Gaussians for continuous features, and whether the covariances match decides a linear or a curved boundary.

CMU 07-380 Lecture 10 Guide (Pre-reading Edition): Bayes Nets Break a Joint Distribution into Conditional Probability Tables

The Lec10 slides are not on the 07-380 course site yet, so this guide uses only the PR6 Bayes Nets pre-reading and the 15-281 Bayes Net Demo. A joint distribution can answer any query, but nobody hands it to you and it is too big to store; a Bayes net writes it as a product of 'node given parents' tables, and every missing edge is an independence assumption.

CMU 07-380 Stage Recap: From Reasoning Under Certainty and Optimization to Uncertainty

The course site's schedule splits 07-380's first ten lectures into Reasoning Under Certainty, Optimization and Reasoning Under Uncertainty: prove things with logic and plan with search, then write problems as constrained objectives, and finally let a prior in with MAP and turn to probabilistic models. HW1 tests logic plus search, HW2 planning plus LP graphing, HW3 writing solvers plus PCA and MAP derivations.