New computational algorithms make it possible to build neural networks with many input nodes and many layers, and distinguish "deep learning" of these networks from previous work on artificial neural nets.
One approach might be to capture the important structure of the current environment in a maximally compact way (to preserve capacity for future learning). Such learning is likely to result in positive transfer if future training domains share some structural similarity with the old ones.
Boltzmann machines (BMs) are appealing candidates for powerful priors in varia-tional autoencoders (V AEs), as they are capable of capturing nontrivial and multi-modal distributions over discrete variables.