Two Minute Papers What is an Autoencoder

Autoencoders are neural networks that are capable of creating sparse representations of the input data and can therefore be used for image compression. There are denoising autoencoders that after learning these sparse representations, can be presented with noisy images. What is even better is a variant that is called the variational autoencoder that not only learns these sparse representations, but can also draw new images as well. We can, for instance, ask it to create new handwritten digits and we can act