Autoencoders

At the heart of deep learning lies the neural network, an intricate interconnected system of
nodes that mimics the human brain’s neural architecture. Neural networks excel at discerning
intricate patterns and representations within vast datasets, allowing them to make predictions,
classify information, and generate novel insights. Autoencoders emerge as a fascinating
subset of neural networks, offering a unique approach to unsupervised learning.
Autoencoders are an adaptable and strong class of architectures for the dynamic field of deep
learning, where neural networks develop constantly to identify complicated patterns and
representations. With their ability to learn effective representations of data, these
unsupervised learning models have received considerable attention and are useful in a wide
variety of areas, from image processing to anomaly detection.

What are Autoencoders?

Autoencoders are a specialized class of algorithms that can learn efficient representations of
input data with no need for labels. It is a class of artificial neural networks designed
for unsupervised learning. Learning to compress and effectively represent input data without
specific labels is the essential principle of an automatic decoder. This is accomplished using a
two-fold structure that consists of an encoder and a decoder. The encoder transforms the
input data into a reduced-dimensional
nsional representation, which is often referred to as “latent
space” or “encoding”. From that representation, a decoder rebuilds the initial input. For the
network to gain meaningful patterns in data, a process of encoding and decoding facilitates
the definition of essential features.

Architecture of Autoencoder in Deep Learning

The general architecture of an autoencoder includes an encoder, decoder, and bottleneck
layer.
1. Encoder
 Input layer take raw input data
 The hidden layers progressively reduce the dimensionality of the input, capturing
important features and patterns. These layer compose the encoder.
 The bottleneck layer (latent space) is the final hidden layer, where the dimensionality
is significantly reduced. This layer represents the compressed encoding of the input
data.
2. Decoder
 The bottleneck layer takes the encoded representation and expands it back to the
dimensionality of the original input.
 The hidden layers progressively increase the dimensionality and aim to reconstruct the
original input.
 The output layer produces the reconstructed output, which ideally should be as close as
possible to the input data.
3. The loss function used during training is typically a reconstruction loss, measuring the
difference between the input and the reconstructed output. Common choices include mean
squared error (MSE) for continuous data or binary cross-entropy for binary data.
4. During training, the autoencoder learns to minimize the reconstruction loss, forcing the
network to capture the most important features of the input data in the bottleneck layer.
After the training process, only the encoder part of the autoencoder is retained to encode a
similar type of data used in the training process. The different ways to constrain the network
are: –
 Keep small Hidden Layers: If the size of each hidden layer is kept as small as possible,
then the network will be forced to pick up only the representative features of the data thus
encoding the data.
 Regularization: In this method, a loss term is added to the cost function which
encourages the network to train in ways other than copying the input.
 Denoising: Another way of constraining the network is to add noise to the input and teach
the network how to remove the noise from the data.
 Tuning the Activation Functions: This method involves changing the activation
functions of various nodes so that a majority of the nodes are dormant thus, effectively
reducing the size of the hidden layers.

Types of Autoencoders
There are diverse types of autoencoders and analyze the advantages and disadvantages
associated with different variation:

Denoising Autoencoder
Denoising autoencoder works on a partially corrupted input and trains to recover the original
undistorted image. As mentioned above, this method is an effective way to constrain the
network from simply copying the input and thus learn the underlying structure and important
features of the data.

Advantages
1. This type of autoencoder can extract important features and reduce the noise or the useless
features.
2. Denoising autoencoders can be used as a form of data augmentation, the restored images
can be used as augmented data thus generating additional training samples.
Disadvantages
1. Selecting the right type and level of noise to introduce can be challenging and may require
domain knowledge.
2. Denoising process can result into loss of some information that is needed from the
original input. This loss can impact accuracy of the output.

Sparse Autoencoder
This type of autoencoder typically contains more hidden units than the input but only a few
are allowed to be active at once. This property is called the sparsity of the network. The
sparsity of the network can be controlled by either manually zeroing the required hidden
units, tuning the activation functions or by adding a loss term to the cost function.
Advantages
1. The sparsity constraint in sparse autoencoders helps in filtering out noise and irrelevant
features during the encoding process.
2. These autoencoders often learn important and meaningful features due to their emphasis
on sparse activations.
Disadvantages
1. The choice of hyperparameters play a significant role in the performance of this
autoencoder. Different inputs should result in the activation of different nodes of the
network.
2. The application of sparsity constraint increases computational complexity.

Variational Autoencoder
Variational autoencoder makes strong assumptions about the distribution of latent variables
and uses the Stochastic Gradient Variational Bayes estimator in the training process.
Advantages
1. Variational Autoencoders are used to generate new data points that resemble the original
training data. These samples are learned from the latent space.
2. Variational Autoencoder is probabilistic framework that is used to learn a compressed
representation of the data that captures its underlying structure and variations, so it is
useful in detecting anomalies and data exploration.
Disadvantages
1. Variational Autoencoder use approximations to estimate the true distribution of the latent
variables. This approximation introduces some level of error, which can affect the quality
of generated samples.
2. The generated samples may only cover a limited subset of the true data distribution. This
can result in a lack of diversity in generated samples.

Convolutional Autoencoder
Convolutional autoencoders are a type of autoencoder that use convolutional neural networks
(CNNs) as their building blocks. The encoder consists of multiple layers that take a image or
a grid as input and pass it through different convolution layers thus forming a compressed
representation of the input. The decoder is the mirror image of the encoder it deconvolves the
compressed representation and tries to reconstruct the original image.
Advantages
1. Convolutional autoencoder can compress high-dimensional image data into a lower-
dimensional data. This improves storage efficiency and transmission of image data.
2. Convolutional autoencoder can reconstruct missing parts of an image. It can also handle
images with slight variations in object position or orientation.
Disadvantages
1. These autoencoder are prone to overfitting. Proper regularization techniques should be
used to tackle this issue.
2. Compression of data can cause data loss which can result in reconstruction of a lower
quality image.