Generate diverse coding challenges that require
implementing and training different types of
models using PyTorch. The challenges should
cover a range of domains, including:
Computer Vision (e.g., segmenting images, object detection, anomaly detection)
Natural Language Processing (e.g., named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, machine
translation)
Time Series & Sequential Data (e.g., stock price prediction, sequence classification,
reinforcement learning)
Pattern Recognition & Representation Learning (e.g., autoencoders, contrastive learning,
generative modeling)
Each challenge should include:
A clear problem statement.
A publicly available dataset suitable for training.
A brief outline of the expected approach (e.g., model architectures to consider).
The goal is to implement and train these models independently without external help, so provide
only the challenge and dataset details—no code solutions or step-by-step guidance
Recent advancements in deep learning frameworks like PyTorch have democratized access to
state-of-the-art model implementations across diverse domains [1] [2] . This report presents 12
coding challenges spanning four critical areas of machine learning, designed to develop
practical implementation skills while leveraging publicly available datasets.
Computer Vision Challenges
1. Medical Image Segmentation with U-Net
Problem Statement: Implement a U-Net architecture to segment salt deposits in subsurface
seismic images, crucial for hydrocarbon exploration.
Dataset: TGS Salt Identification Challenge (Kaggle) with 4,000+ annotated seismic image
patches [1] .
Approach:
Design encoder blocks with 3x3 convolutions and max pooling for feature extraction
Implement decoder blocks with transposed convolutions and skip connections from encoder
Use dice coefficient loss to handle class imbalance
Apply data augmentation with random rotations and flips
2. Real-Time Object Detection with Faster R-CNN
Problem Statement: Develop an object detection system for COCO dataset classes using
PyTorch's pre-trained models.
Dataset: COCO 2017 (118k training images with 80 object categories) [2] .
Approach:
Compare performance of ResNet50 vs MobileNetv3 backbones
Implement non-maximum suppression for overlapping boxes
Create custom visualization of bounding boxes with class labels
Optimize inference speed for real-time video processing
3. Industrial Anomaly Detection Using Autoencoders
Problem Statement: Detect defective products in manufacturing line images through
reconstruction error analysis.
Dataset: MVTec AD (5,354 high-resolution industrial images across 15 categories) [3] .
Approach:
Build convolutional autoencoder with skip connections
Train exclusively on defect-free samples
Calculate pixel-wise MSE between input and reconstruction
Implement dynamic thresholding based on validation set performance
Natural Language Processing Challenges
4. Named Entity Recognition with BiLSTM-CRF
Problem Statement: Identify persons, organizations, and locations in news articles.
Dataset: CoNLL-2003 (14,987 sentences with 4 entity types) [4] .
Approach:
Implement bidirectional LSTM with character-level embeddings
Add CRF layer for sequence labeling constraints
Handle OOV words using subword tokenization
Optimize using Viterbi decoding during inference
5. Multilingual Machine Translation with Transformer
Problem Statement: Create English-German translation system using attention mechanisms.
Dataset: WMT14 (4.5M sentence pairs with subword tokens).
Approach:
Implement multi-head self-attention blocks
Use positional encoding for sequence order
Apply label smoothing and dropout regularization
Implement beam search decoding with length penalty
6. Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
Problem Statement: Predict sentiment towards specific product features in customer reviews.
Dataset: SemEval-2014 Task 4 (6,000 restaurant reviews with aspect categories).
Approach:
Implement hierarchical attention networks
Separate aspect detection and sentiment classification
Use domain-adaptive BERT embeddings
Handle multi-aspect sentences with pointer networks
Time Series & Sequential Data Challenges
7. Stock Price Forecasting with Temporal Convolutions
Problem Statement: Predict next-day closing prices for S&P 500 constituents.
Dataset: Yahoo Finance Historical Prices (10-year daily OHLC data).
Approach:
Implement dilated causal convolutions
Use quantile loss for uncertainty estimation
Add technical indicators as engineered features
Handle missing values through forward filling
8. Human Activity Recognition with LSTMs
Problem Statement: Classify smartphone sensor data into 6 activity classes.
Dataset: UCI HAR (10,299 samples from 30 subjects).
Approach:
Implement bidirectional LSTM with attention pooling
Handle variable-length sequences using masking
Apply sensor noise augmentation
Use F1-score for imbalanced class evaluation
9. Reinforcement Learning for CartPole Control
Problem Statement: Train DQN agent to balance pole in OpenAI Gym environment.
Dataset: CartPole-v1 (state: position/velocity, action: left/right).
Approach:
Implement experience replay buffer
Use epsilon-greedy exploration strategy
Design dueling network architecture
Handle reward shaping for stable training
Pattern Recognition & Representation Learning
10. Dimensionality Reduction with Variational Autoencoders
Problem Statement: Learn latent representations of MNIST digits with uncertainty.
Dataset: MNIST (60k handwritten digits).
Approach:
Implement KL divergence regularization
Use reparameterization trick for sampling
Compare reconstruction vs generated samples
Visualize 2D latent space projections
11. Contrastive Learning for Image Retrieval
Problem Statement: Train model to find similar fashion items without labels.
Dataset: Fashion-MNIST (70k grayscale fashion images).
Approach:
Implement SimCLR framework with NT-Xent loss
Design augmentation pipeline (crop, color jitter)
Use projection head for latent space
Evaluate using k-NN classification accuracy
12. Conditional GAN for Face Generation
Problem Statement: Generate photorealistic faces conditioned on age/gender.
Dataset: CelebA (202k face images with 40 attributes).
Approach:
Implement spectral normalization in discriminator
Use Wasserstein loss with gradient penalty
Add projection discriminator for conditioning
Monitor inception score during training
Conclusion
These challenges provide structured pathways to master PyTorch implementation across
fundamental ML paradigms. By emphasizing dataset-specific preprocessing, architectural
customization, and performance evaluation, practitioners develop crucial skills for real-world
deployment. Future extensions could incorporate multi-modal learning challenges combining
vision and language, or federated learning scenarios with distributed data.
⁂
1. https://pyimagesearch.com/2021/11/08/u-net-training-image-segmentation-models-in-pytorch/
2. https://pyimagesearch.com/2021/08/02/pytorch-object-detection-with-pre-trained-networks/
3. https://stackademic.com/blog/deep-learning-based-anomaly-detection-using-pytorch
4. https://github.com/dayyass/pytorch-ner
