variational autoencoder

An autoencoder is a type of artificial neural network used to learn efficient data codings in an unsupervised manner. The aim of an autoencoder is to learn a representation (encoding) for a set of data, typically for dimensionality reduction, by training the network to ignore signal “noise”. Along with the reduction side, a reconstructing side is learnt, where the autoencoder tries to generate from the reduced encoding a representation as close as possible to its original input, hence its name. Variants exist, aiming to force the learned representations to assume useful properties. Examples are regularized autoencoders (Sparse, Denoising and Contractive), which are effective in learning representations for subsequent classification tasks, and Variational autoencoders, with applications as generative models. Autoencoders are applied to many problems, from facial recognition to acquiring the semantic meaning of words.