Deep Symmetric Autoencoders from the Eckart-Young-Schmidt Perspective

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Brivio, Simone, Franco, Nicola Rares
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Brivio, Simone
Franco, Nicola Rares
author_facet Brivio, Simone
Franco, Nicola Rares
contents Deep autoencoders have become a fundamental tool in various machine learning applications, ranging from dimensionality reduction and reduced order modeling of partial differential equations to anomaly detection and neural machine translation. Despite their empirical success, a solid theoretical foundation for their expressiveness remains elusive, particularly when compared to classical projection-based techniques. In this work, we aim to take a step forward in this direction by presenting a comprehensive analysis of what we refer to as symmetric autoencoders, a broad class of deep learning architectures ubiquitous in the literature. Specifically, we introduce a formal distinction between different classes of symmetric architectures, analyzing their strengths and limitations from a mathematical perspective. For instance, we show that the reconstruction error of symmetric autoencoders with orthonormality constraints can be understood by leveraging the well-renowned Eckart-Young-Schmidt (EYS) theorem. As a byproduct of our analysis, we end up developing the EYS initialization strategy for symmetric autoencoders, which is based on an iterated application of the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). To validate our findings, we conduct a series of numerical experiments where we benchmark our proposal against conventional deep autoencoders, discussing the importance of model design and initialization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11641
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Symmetric Autoencoders from the Eckart-Young-Schmidt Perspective
Brivio, Simone
Franco, Nicola Rares
Numerical Analysis
Machine Learning
68T07, 47N40
Deep autoencoders have become a fundamental tool in various machine learning applications, ranging from dimensionality reduction and reduced order modeling of partial differential equations to anomaly detection and neural machine translation. Despite their empirical success, a solid theoretical foundation for their expressiveness remains elusive, particularly when compared to classical projection-based techniques. In this work, we aim to take a step forward in this direction by presenting a comprehensive analysis of what we refer to as symmetric autoencoders, a broad class of deep learning architectures ubiquitous in the literature. Specifically, we introduce a formal distinction between different classes of symmetric architectures, analyzing their strengths and limitations from a mathematical perspective. For instance, we show that the reconstruction error of symmetric autoencoders with orthonormality constraints can be understood by leveraging the well-renowned Eckart-Young-Schmidt (EYS) theorem. As a byproduct of our analysis, we end up developing the EYS initialization strategy for symmetric autoencoders, which is based on an iterated application of the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). To validate our findings, we conduct a series of numerical experiments where we benchmark our proposal against conventional deep autoencoders, discussing the importance of model design and initialization.
title Deep Symmetric Autoencoders from the Eckart-Young-Schmidt Perspective
topic Numerical Analysis
Machine Learning
68T07, 47N40
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11641