AML Lab Thesis Template

A LaTeX template for bachelor's and master's theses written with the Applied Machine Learning Lab at the University of Bonn.

Every file is a skeleton, and its comments explain what belongs there. Read the comments as you go, then delete them.

Who this is for

Students writing a bachelor's or master's thesis supervised by the AML Lab. If you are not one yet and would like to be, the lab's open topics and application process are here: https://appliedmachinelearning-lab.github.io/teaching/theses/

It is not intended for doctoral theses, which carry different requirements. Adapting it for one would be perfectly possible, but that is out of scope here.

Beyond the title page and the colours, nothing is lab-specific, so it works as a general thesis template too. The house rules below are opinions, not requirements of the examination office: check your own regulations, which take precedence. Feel free to use it outside the AML Lab and the University of Bonn.

Example

examples/compiled.pdf is what this template produces, unedited: the title page, the front-matter lists, and the worked figures, tables and citations described below.

Compiling

thesis.tex in the repository root is the entry point. Everything else is pulled in from there.

make            # build -> build/thesis.pdf
make watch      # rebuild on every save
make clean      # remove build artefacts, keep the PDF
make purge      # remove build/ entirely
make count      # approximate word count of the body chapters

make runs latexmk, which reruns pdfLaTeX and biber as often as needed. If you prefer to drive the build yourself, or your editor does it for you, point it at thesis.tex with pdfLaTeX and biber; do not use bibtex.

What you need

A TeX distribution (TeX Live, MacTeX, MiKTeX) with pdfLaTeX, latexmk and biber.

A full installation already has everything. Minimal and split installations usually do not: the fonts this template uses are the pieces most often left out.

CTAN package	Provides	Needed for
fira	FiraMono.sty	monospace
newpx	newpxtext.sty, newpxmath.sty	Palatino text and matching maths
binhex	binhex.tex	newpxmath inputs it unconditionally
tex-gyre	tgheros.sty, Pagella	Helvetica sans, Palatino

A missing .sty stops the build outright, but a missing font does not: LaTeX substitutes another and carries on, so treat LaTeX Font Warning: Font shape ... undefined in the log as a failure rather than noise.

First steps

1. Fill in the fields at the top of text/titlepage.tex.
2. Name your .bib file in preamble.tex, and put your notation macros there.
3. Work through text/ in order. Delete the placeholder prose as you replace it.
4. Trim or delete text/notations.tex and text/abbreviations.tex; both ship with example content.
5. Switch \documentclass[regular] to \documentclass[print] in thesis.tex when you send it to be bound. At the time of writing, bachelor's and master's theses at the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Bonn do not have to be printed and are handed in as a digital file upload. Check with the examination office rather than relying on this note.

Layout

thesis.tex                 entry point: class option and \input order
aml-thesis.cls             the house style -- you should not need to edit this
preamble.tex               your bib file, extra packages, your own macros
text/                      all prose (titlepage, abstract, ch1-ch5, appendix, ...)
figures/template/          logos
figures/examples/          worked example diagrams (delete as you replace them)
tables/                    table fragments (.tex)
bibliography/references.bib
examples/compiled.pdf      what this template produces, unedited

Three levels, and it is worth knowing which is which:

• aml-thesis.cls is the lab's shared style: fonts, colours, headings, how tables and captions look, how citations are formatted. Every thesis written here looks the same because of this file. Leave it alone.
• preamble.tex is yours. Extra packages, your notation macros, and any deliberate override of a class default.
• text/ is prose only. A \usepackage or \newcommand in a chapter belongs in the preamble.

Class options

\documentclass[regular]{aml-thesis}   % uniform margins, no blank pages
\documentclass[print]{aml-thesis}     % alternating margins, blank versos

Switching is one token; nothing else needs editing. Other options (DIV=11, a5paper, …) pass straight through to KOMA's scrreprt.

House rules

Rule	Why
Labels prefixed sec: fig: tab: eq:	You can tell what a \ref will return
\Cref{...}, never bare \ref	cleveref supplies the word and keeps it correct when floats move
\textcite / \parencite, never \cite	plain \cite is ambiguous under authoryear
booktabs rules, no vertical rules	a table needing vertical rules needs fewer columns
Bold headers and row labels, striped rows, \texttt figures	see tables/example_table.tex
\bm for bold maths, not \mathbf	\mathbf fails silently on Greek letters
Colour only from a colour-blind-safe palette	see the colour section of chapter 2

Fuller explanations live in the comments of the file each rule applies to.

Where this came from

This template began as the LaTeX source of Cryptocurrencies: Trading and Return Prediction via Machine Learning Methods, a 2018 master's thesis by Tobias Deußer (now a postdoc at the lab) and Lars Hillebrand (now a postdoc at Fraunhofer IAIS), written at Copenhagen Business School. The full text is available from the CBS Research Portal at the link above.

It has since been rewritten to fit the needs of the AML Lab at the University of Bonn. The rewrite was carried out with the help of Claude Opus 5.

Licence

The template is released under the MIT licence: see LICENSE.

Two things in this repository are not covered by that licence:

• The logos in figures/template/. The Universität Bonn logo and the lab mark remain the property of their owners. They are here so that a lab thesis builds out of the box, not as material the MIT licence grants you rights over. The lab logo may be used by members of the AML Lab and by students they supervise, for reports and theses; if you are using this template outside the lab, replace both with your own. LICENSE carries the exact terms.
• The example diagrams in figures/examples/, adapted from NNTikZ, Copyright (c) 2024 Fraser Love. Those are MIT licensed as well, and MIT requires the copyright and permission notice to travel with them: the attribution is kept in each file header and repeated in the caption that uses it. Leave it there if you keep the figures.