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Modular Autoencoders for Ensemble Feature Extraction
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Feature Extraction: Modern Questions and Challenges at NIPS 2015, PMLR 44:242-259, 2015.
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.