Lin Yang is by far the worst lecturer I've ever had.

The lectures don't make much sense but the textbook is ok, and the class is project based and you learn a lot from the projects.

Since this is a 'graduate' and 'special topics' class, I recommend that people take it only if they are interested and willing to put enough effort into learning the material. I loved that we focused on the theory part, if you're planning to work on this field or in a related area, it makes it easier to understand the proofs and ideas used in recent papers. HW assignments were based on the proofs we covered in the class and often required you to do a literature search and understand some of the fundamental papers in the field (this may be a downside for some people but imo it is how graduate classes should be). There are no midterm or final exams, instead, you do a group project where you present a paper and write a report, which was fun and helpful. It's one of the classes where I learned a lot, unlike the others where you either memorize or repeat the same things all over again.

The instructor is extremely smart and knowledgeable in the subject, but it could be better if lecture notes were a bit more organized (since it is a proof-heavy class, it is sometimes hard to focus or follow the proofs if there is a typo or the text is not readable).

This class is an introduction to reinforcement learning. It starts with the basics of RL such as Markov Decision Processes and ends at... well I wouldn't know because most students (including myself) stopped watching Prof Yang's lectures. They were that bad. In general, this class is really disorganised, does not cover the material well and has no interest in teaching anything.

Regarding the organisation, these are some of the events that took place:
-Mid-Week 1: there wasn't any Bruinlearn page for the class, so students emailed Prof Yang until he made one.
-Week 4: the Prof finally hires a TA.
-Week 9: final project proposal is marked 5 days before the entire project is due.
-Week 10: the "midterm" exam, scheduled to happen on Week 5, takes place.
-3 Weeks after end of term: a grade is published to MyUCLA, with nothing else said.

More or less everything happened either late, never and with no feedback from the instructors.

The lectures are not much better. Most of the material is borrowed from a public UCL lecture series from 2015 and is replicated using inconsistent slides full of errors. Sometimes these errors are fixed, but then the fixed versions are not actually uploaded for students to use (even though we asked for this repeatedly).

Looking back, I should have seen the warning signs in the first week and dropped this class immediately. To get an A in this class, I pretty much studied every university's RL class save for the one I was actually paying for. This class is a disgrace.