Modular Autoencoders for Ensemble Feature Extraction

Henry W J Reeve; Gavin Brown

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arXiv · 1511.07340

Modular Autoencoders for Ensemble Feature Extraction

Henry W J Reeve·Gavin Brown

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Abstract

We introduce the concept of a Modular Autoencoder (MAE), capable of learning a set of diverse but complementary representations from unlabelled data, that can later be used for supervised tasks. The learning of the representations is controlled by a trade off parameter, and we show on six benchmark datasets the optimum lies between two extremes: a set of smaller, independent autoencoders each with low capacity, versus a single monolithic encoding, outperforming an appropriate baseline. In the present paper we explore the special case of linear MAE, and derive an SVD-based algorithm which converges several orders of magnitude faster than gradient descent.

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Henry W J Reeve, Gavin Brown. 2015-11-23. Modular Autoencoders for Ensemble Feature Extraction. https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.07340

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