Unsupervised learning algorithms aim to discover the structure hidden in the data, and to learn representations that are more suitable as input to a supervised machine than the raw input. Many unsupervised methods are based on reconstructing the input from the representation, while constraining the representation to have certain desirable properties (e.g. Others are based on approximating density by stochastically reconstructing the input from the representation. We describe a novel and efficient algorithm to learn sparse representations, and compare it theoretically and experimentally with a similar machines trained probabilistically, namely a Restricted Boltzmann Machine. We propose a simple criterion to compare and select different unsupervised machines based on the trade-off between the reconstruction error and the information content of the representation.

We propose an unsupervised method for learning multi-stage hierarchies of sparse convolutional features. While sparse coding has become an increasingly popular method for learning visual features, it is most often trained at the patch level. Applying the resulting filters convolutionally results in highly redundant codes because overlapping patches are encoded in isolation. By training convolutionally over large image windows, our method reduces the redudancy between feature vectors at neighboring locations and improves the efficiency of the overall representation. In addition to a linear decoder that reconstructs the image from sparse features, our method trains an efficient feed-forward encoder that predicts quasi-sparse features from the input. While patch-based training rarely produces anything but oriented edge detectors, we show that convolutional training produces highly diverse filters, including center-surround filters, corner detectors, cross detectors, and oriented grating detectors. We show that using these filters in multi-stage convolutional network architecture improves performance on a number of visual recognition and detection tasks.

Unsupervised learning algorithms aim to discover the structure hidden in the data, and to learn representations that are more suitable as input to a supervised machine than the raw input. Many unsupervised methods are based on reconstructing the input from the representation, while constraining the representation to have certain desirable properties (e.g. low dimension, sparsity, etc). Others are based on approximating density by stochastically reconstructing the input from the representation. We describe a novel and efficient algorithm to learn sparse representations, and compare it theoretically and experimentally with a similar machines trained probabilistically, namely a Restricted Boltzmann Machine. We propose a simple criterion to compare and select different unsupervised machines based on the trade-off between the reconstruction error and the information content of the representation. We demonstrate this method by extracting features from a dataset of handwritten numerals, and from a dataset of natural image patches. We show that by stacking multiple levels of such machines and by training sequentially, high-order dependencies between the input variables can be captured.