What is: Contractive Autoencoder?

A Contractive Autoencoder is an autoencoder that adds a penalty term to the classical reconstruction cost function. This penalty term corresponds to the Frobenius norm of the Jacobian matrix of the encoder activations with respect to the input. This penalty term results in a localized space contraction which in turn yields robust features on the activation layer. The penalty helps to carve a representation that better captures the local directions of variation dictated by the data, corresponding to a lower-dimensional non-linear manifold, while being more invariant to the vast majority of directions orthogonal to the manifold.