What Regularized Auto-Encoders Learn from the Data Generating Distribution
Authors: Guillaume Alain, Yoshua Bengio

Abstract: What do auto-encoders learn about the underlying data generating distribution? Recent work suggests that some auto-encoder variants do a good job of capturing the local manifold structure of data. This paper clarifies some of these previous intuitive observations by showing that minimizing a particular form of regularized reconstruction error yields a reconstruction function that locally characterizes the shape of the data generating density. We show that the auto-encoder captures the score (derivative of the log-density with respect to the input), along with the second derivative of the density and the local mean associated with the unknown data-generating density. This is the second result linking denoising auto-encoders and score matching, but in way that is different from previous work, and can be applied to the case when the auto-encoder reconstruction function does not necessarily correspond to the derivative of an energy function. The theorems provided here are completely generic and do not depend on the parametrization of the auto-encoder: they show what the auto-encoder would tend to if given enough capacity and examples. These results are for a contractive training criterion we show to be similar to the denoising auto-encoder training criterion with small corruption noise, but with contraction applied on the whole reconstruction function rather than just encoder. Similarly to score matching, one can consider the proposed training criterion as a convenient alternative to maximum likelihood, i.e., one not involving a partition function.

Decision: conferenceOral-iclr2013-conference