On Nonparametric Guidance for Learning Autoencoder Representations

Unsupervised discovery of latent representations, in addition to being useful for density modeling, visualisation and exploratory data analysis, is also increasingly important for learning features relevant to discriminative tasks. Autoencoders, in particular, have proven to be an effective way to learn latent codes that reflect meaningful variations in data. A continuing challenge, however, is guiding an autoencoder toward representations that are useful for particular tasks. A complementary challenge is to find codes that are invariant to irrelevant transformations of the data. The most common way of introducing such problem-specific guidance in autoencoders has been through the incorporation of a parametric component that ties the latent representation to the label information. In this work, we argue that a preferable approach relies instead on a nonparametric guidance mechanism. Conceptually, it ensures that there exists a function that can predict the label information, witho...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: JMLR
• Authors: Jasper Snoek, Ryan Prescott Adams, Hugo Larochelle
• Keywords: Exploratory Data Analysis, JMLR 2012, Norb, Parametric Component, Programming Languages