600+ Deep Learning Interview Questions (MAANG)

600+ Deep Learning Interview Questions (MAANG) free download

This course will give you the edge needed to succeed in any deep learning discussion and help you Ace Your Interviews

This course is designed to help you crack deep learning interviews with confidence. It features over 600 carefully curated multiple-choice questions covering everything from data preprocessing and model training to supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms. Each question includes detailed explanations to deepen your understanding and help you avoid common pitfalls. Whether you're preparing for a job interview or looking to reinforce your knowledge, this course will give you the edge needed to succeed in any deep learning discussion.

Topics Covered are :-

1. Fundamentals of Neural Networks (Difficulty: Easy to Medium)

Total MCQs: ~70

• 1.1. Introduction to Deep Learning

  • Definition of Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and AI.

  • Differences and overlaps between ML and DL.

  • Why Deep Learning is popular now (data, computational power, algorithms).

  • Applications of Deep Learning (e.g., Computer Vision, NLP, Speech Recognition, Reinforcement Learning).

  • MCQs: 10

• 1.2. Perceptron and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)

  • Biological vs. Artificial Neurons.

  • Perceptron: Architecture, working, limitations (linear separability).

  • Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP): Structure (input, hidden, output layers), feedforward mechanism.

  • Weights and Biases: Role, initialization (random, zeros, ones, Xavier, He).

  • MCQs: 15

• 1.3. Activation Functions

  • Purpose of activation functions (non-linearity, introducing decision boundaries).

  • Types: Sigmoid, Tanh, ReLU, Leaky ReLU, PReLU, ELU, Softmax.

  • Pros and cons of each, when to use them (e.g., Softmax for multi-class classification).

  • Vanishing Gradient Problem: Explanation, how different activations alleviate it.

  • MCQs: 15

• 1.4. Loss Functions (Cost Functions)

  • Purpose: Quantifying model error.

  • Types: Mean Squared Error (MSE), Cross-Entropy (Binary, Categorical), Hinge Loss.

  • When to use which loss function (regression vs. classification).

  • MCQs: 10

• 1.5. Forward and Backward Propagation

  • Detailed step-by-step explanation of forward pass.

  • Detailed step-by-step explanation of backpropagation (calculating gradients).

  • Chain Rule in backpropagation.

  • Computational graph representation.

  • MCQs: 20

2. Training and Optimization (Difficulty: Medium)

Total MCQs: ~100

• 2.1. Gradient Descent and its Variants

  • Concept of Gradient Descent: Minimizing loss function.

  • Learning Rate: Importance, impact of too high/low learning rate.

  • Batch Gradient Descent: Pros and cons.

  • Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD): Pros and cons, noisy updates.

  • Mini-Batch Gradient Descent: Advantages, batch size selection.

  • MCQs: 25

• 2.2. Optimizers

  • Beyond SGD: Momentum, Nesterov Accelerated Gradient (NAG).

  • Adaptive Learning Rate Optimizers: AdaGrad, RMSprop, Adam, Nadam, AdaDelta.

  • Understanding their mechanisms and when to use them.

  • MCQs: 25

• 2.3. Regularization Techniques

  • Overfitting and Underfitting: Definitions, causes, detection.

  • L1 and L2 Regularization (Weight Decay): Mathematical formulation, effect on weights.

  • Dropout: Mechanism, how it prevents overfitting, dropout rate selection.

  • Early Stopping: Principle, how to implement.

  • Data Augmentation: Importance, common techniques (image, text).

  • Batch Normalization: Purpose (internal covariate shift), mechanism, benefits (faster training, regularization effect).

  • Layer Normalization, Instance Normalization, Group Normalization (brief overview).

  • MCQs: 30

• 2.4. Hyperparameter Tuning

  • What are hyperparameters (vs. parameters).

  • Common hyperparameters to tune (learning rate, batch size, number of layers, number of neurons, activation functions, regularization strengths).

  • Techniques: Grid Search, Random Search, Bayesian Optimization, Genetic Algorithms (conceptual).

  • MCQs: 10

• 2.5. Initialization Strategies

  • Importance of good weight initialization.

  • Xavier/Glorot initialization, He initialization.

  • Issues with poor initialization (vanishing/exploding gradients).

  • MCQs: 10

3. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) (Difficulty: Medium to Hard)

Total MCQs: ~120

• 3.1. Introduction to CNNs

  • Motivation for CNNs (spatial hierarchies, local patterns).

  • Applications (image classification, object detection, segmentation).

  • MCQs: 10

• 3.2. Core Components of CNNs

  • Convolutional Layer:

    • Filters/Kernels: Definition, size, number.

    • Stride: Effect on output size.

    • Padding: Same, Valid, purpose.

    • Receptive Field: Concept and calculation.

    • Feature Maps.

    • Mathematical operation of convolution.

    • MCQs: 30

  • Pooling Layer:

    • Purpose (dimensionality reduction, translation invariance).

    • Types: Max Pooling, Average Pooling.

    • Stride and kernel size for pooling.

    • MCQs: 15

  • Activation Functions in CNNs (typically ReLU).

  • Fully Connected Layer: Role in CNNs.

  • Output Layer: Softmax for classification.

  • MCQs: 10

• 3.3. Advanced CNN Architectures

  • LeNet-5 (historical significance).

  • AlexNet: Key innovations (ReLU, Dropout, GPU).

  • VGG: Simplicity, depth.

  • Inception Networks (GoogleNet): Multi-scale processing, inception module.

  • ResNet: Residual connections, solving vanishing gradient in deep networks.

  • DenseNet: Dense connections.

  • MobileNet/EfficientNet (briefly mention efficiency for mobile/edge devices).

  • MCQs: 30

• 3.4. Transfer Learning and Fine-tuning with CNNs

  • Concept of pre-trained models.

  • Advantages of transfer learning (less data, faster training).

  • Strategies: Feature extraction, fine-tuning (partial, full).

  • MCQs: 15

• 3.5. CNN Applications

  • Object Detection: R-CNN, Fast R-CNN, Faster R-CNN, YOLO, SSD (high-level understanding).

  • Image Segmentation: U-Net, Mask R-CNN (high-level understanding).

  • MCQs: 10

4. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Sequence Models (Difficulty: Medium to Hard)

Total MCQs: ~100

• 4.1. Introduction to RNNs

  • Handling sequential data.

  • Challenges with traditional ANNs for sequences.

  • Recurrent connections, hidden state.

  • Unrolling RNNs.

  • Applications (NLP, speech recognition, time series).

  • MCQs: 10

• 4.2. Basic RNN Architecture

  • Input, hidden state, output at each time step.

  • Vanishing/Exploding Gradient Problem in RNNs: Explanation, impact on long-term dependencies.

  • MCQs: 15

• 4.3. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)

  • Solving vanishing gradient problem.

  • Internal gates: Forget gate, Input gate, Output gate.

  • Cell state: Memory mechanism.

  • Detailed walk-through of LSTM operations.

  • MCQs: 30

• 4.4. Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU)

  • Simplified version of LSTM.

  • Update gate, Reset gate.

  • Comparison with LSTM (fewer parameters, sometimes faster).

  • MCQs: 15

• 4.5. Bidirectional RNNs (Bi-RNN, Bi-LSTM, Bi-GRU)

  • Processing sequence in both forward and backward directions.

  • Advantages for tasks requiring context from both sides.

  • MCQs: 10

• 4.6. Encoder-Decoder Architecture and Seq2Seq Models

  • Machine Translation, sequence generation.

  • Context vector.

  • Limitations of fixed-size context vector.

  • MCQs: 10

• 4.7. Attention Mechanism

  • Solving the fixed-size context vector problem.

  • Concept of "paying attention" to relevant parts of input.

  • Self-attention (brief mention leading to Transformers).

  • MCQs: 10

5. Transformer Networks (Difficulty: Hard)

Total MCQs: ~70

• 5.1. Introduction to Transformers

  • "Attention Is All You Need" paper.

  • Why Transformers surpassed RNNs for many NLP tasks (parallelization, handling long-range dependencies).

  • Encoder-Decoder structure.

  • MCQs: 10

• 5.2. Self-Attention Mechanism

  • Query, Key, Value (Q, K, V).

  • Scaled Dot-Product Attention: Formula, intuition.

  • Multi-Head Attention: Benefits (different attention heads, different representation subspaces).

  • Masked Multi-Head Attention (for decoding).

  • MCQs: 25

• 5.3. Positional Encoding

  • Why it's needed (lack of sequential information in self-attention).

  • Mathematical formulation (sinusoidal).

  • MCQs: 10

• 5.4. Layer Normalization and Feed-Forward Networks within Transformers

  • Role of Layer Normalization.

  • Position-wise Feed-Forward Networks.

  • Residual Connections within Transformer blocks.

  • MCQs: 10

• 5.5. Transformer Encoder and Decoder Stacks

  • How multiple layers are stacked.

  • Encoder's role (feature extraction), Decoder's role (generation).

  • Cross-attention in the decoder.

  • MCQs: 5

• 5.6. Popular Transformer Models

  • BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers): Masked Language Modeling, Next Sentence Prediction.

  • GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer): Decoder-only, causal language modeling.

  • Transformers for Vision (ViT, DETR - brief overview).

  • MCQs: 10

6. Generative Models (Difficulty: Medium to Hard)

Total MCQs: ~60

• 6.1. Introduction to Generative Models

  • Generative vs. Discriminative models.

  • Applications (image generation, data augmentation, anomaly detection).

  • MCQs: 5

• 6.2. Autoencoders (AE)

  • Encoder-Decoder structure.

  • Purpose: Dimensionality reduction, feature learning, denoising.

  • Types: Denoising Autoencoders, Sparse Autoencoders, Variational Autoencoders (VAE).

  • Variational Autoencoders (VAE):

    • Probabilistic approach.

    • Latent space, sampling from latent distribution.

    • Reparameterization trick.

    • Loss function: Reconstruction loss + KL divergence.

    • MCQs: 20

• 6.3. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)

  • Generator and Discriminator: Adversarial training.

  • Minimax game.

  • Challenges: Mode collapse, training instability.

  • Evaluation metrics (Inception Score, FID Score - brief mention).

  • MCQs: 25

• 6.4. Advanced GAN Architectures (brief overview)

  • DCGAN (Deep Convolutional GAN).

  • Conditional GAN (cGAN).

  • CycleGAN (unpaired image-to-image translation).

  • StyleGAN.

  • MCQs: 10

7. Practical Aspects and Ethics (Difficulty: Easy to Medium)

Total MCQs: ~50

• 7.1. Deep Learning Frameworks

  • TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras: Key differences, advantages, disadvantages.

  • Computational Graphs: Static vs. Dynamic.

  • MCQs: 10

• 7.2. Hardware for Deep Learning

  • Importance of GPUs (CUDA, parallelism).

  • TPUs (Tensor Processing Units).

  • CPU vs. GPU vs. TPU.

  • MCQs: 10

• 7.3. Model Deployment

  • Serialization (saving/loading models).

  • Deployment considerations (latency, throughput, resource usage).

  • Introduction to serving frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow Serving, TorchServe).

  • MCQs: 10

• 7.4. Interpretability and Explainability

  • Black-box nature of deep learning models.

  • Importance of interpretability (trust, debugging).

  • Techniques (LIME, SHAP, Grad-CAM - high-level understanding).

  • MCQs: 10

• 7.5. Ethical Considerations in Deep Learning

  • Bias in data and models.

  • Fairness, accountability, transparency.

  • Privacy concerns.

  • MCQs: 10

And Much More !!!