Poster
Topological Autoencoders
Michael Moor · Max Horn · Bastian Rieck · Karsten Borgwardt
Keywords: [ Dimensionality Reduction ] [ Representation Learning ] [ Unsupervised Learning ] [ Autoencoders ] [ Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Learning ]
We propose a novel approach for preserving topological structures of the input space in latent representations of autoencoders. Using persistent homology, a technique from topological data analysis, we calculate topological signatures of both the input and latent space to derive a topological loss term. Under weak theoretical assumptions, we construct this loss in a differentiable manner, such that the encoding learns to retain multi-scale connectivity information. We show that our approach is theoretically well-founded and that it exhibits favourable latent representations on a synthetic manifold as well as on real-world image data sets, while preserving low reconstruction errors.