Training Autoencoders Using Relative Entropy Constraints

Autoencoders are widely used for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction. The backpropagation algorithm for training the parameters of the autoencoder model suffers from problems such as slow convergence. Therefore, researchers propose forward propagation algorithms. However, the existing forward propagation algorithms do not consider the characteristics of the data itself. This paper proposes an autoencoder forward training algorithm based on relative entropy constraints, called relative entropy autoencoder (REAE). When solving the feature map parameters, REAE imposes different constraints on the average activation value of the hidden layer outputs obtained by the feature map for different data sets. In the experimental section, different forward propagation algorithms are compared by applying the features extracted from the autoencoder to an image classification task. The experimental results on three image classification datasets show that the classification performance of the classification model constructed by REAE is better than that of the classification model constructed by other forward propagation algorithms.