Abstract-The success of machine learning algorithms generally depends on data representation, and we hypothesize that this is because different representations can entangle and hide more or less the different explanatory factors of variation behind the data. Although specific domain knowledge can be used to help design representations, learning with generic priors can also be used, and the quest for AI is motivating the design of more powerful representation-learning algorithms implementing such priors. This paper reviews recent work in the area of unsupervised feature learning and joint training of deep learning, covering advances in probabilistic models, auto-encoders, manifold learning, and deep architectures. This motivates longer-term unanswered questions about the appropriate objectives for learning good representations, for computing representations (i.e., inference), and the geometrical connections between representation learning, density estimation and manifold learning.

Previous work has shown that the difficulties in learning deep generative or discriminative models can be overcome by an initial unsupervised learning step that maps inputs to useful intermediate representations. We introduce and motivate a new training principle for unsupervised learning of a representation based on the idea of making the learned representations robust to partial corruption of the input pattern. This approach can be used to train autoencoders, and these denoising autoencoders can be stacked to initialize deep architectures. The algorithm can be motivated from a manifold learning and information theoretic perspective or from a generative model perspective. Comparative experiments clearly show the surprising advantage of corrupting the input of autoencoders on a pattern classification benchmark suite.

Denoising autoencoders have been previously shown to be competitive alternatives to Restricted Boltzmann Machines for unsupervised pre-training of each layer of a deep architecture. We show that a simple denoising autoencoder training criterion is equivalent to matching the score (with respect to the data) of a specific energy based model to that of a non-parametric Parzen density estimator of the data. This yields several useful insights. It defines a proper probabilistic model for the denoising autoencoder technique which makes it in principle possible to sample from them or to rank examples by their energy. It suggests a different way to apply score matching that is related to learning to denoise and does not require computing second derivatives. It justifies the use of tied weights between the encoder and decoder, and suggests ways to extend the success of denoising autoencoders to a larger family of energy-based models.

In this paper, we show a direct relation between spectral embedding methods and kernel PCA, and how both are special cases of a more general learning problem, that of learning the principal eigenfunctions of an operator defined from a kernel and the unknown data generating density.

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