Super-encoder with cooperative autoencoder networks

Dimensionality reduction plays a crucial role in classification, object detection, and pattern recognition tasks. Its main objective is to decrease the dimension of the original data while retaining the most distinctive information. With the emergence of deep learning, an autoencoder has become a state-of-the-art non-linear dimensionality-reduction method. Nonetheless, as the existing autoencoder models are devised to follow the data distribution and employ similarity techniques, preserving distinctive information can be problematic. To tackle this issue, we propose super-encoder (SE) networks trained in a supervised and cooperative manner. The SE consists of an encoder, separator, and decoder networks. The encoder combined with separator networks are dedicated to generating separable latent representation based on the label, and the decoder network should be able to reconstruct it to the original data simultaneously. Herein, we introduce a novel cooperative learning mechanism with a new loss function; therefore, the encoder, separator, and decoder networks can cooperate to achieve these objectives. Extensive experiments using benchmark datasets were conducted. The results indicated that the SE is more effective in extracting separable latent code than the existing supervised and unsupervised dimensionality-reduction models. Furthermore, as a generator, it can obtain highly competitive realistic images.