Autoencoder: hourglass architecture and latent space holes

Autoencoder hourglass architecture Encoder compresses input to a small latent vector z, decoder reconstructs back to original size Input D = 16 Hidden 64 Hidden 32 z dim = 2 Hidden 32 Hidden 64 Output x̂ ≈ x ENCODER E(x) latent z DECODER D(z) Minimize: L = ||x − D(E(x))||² Loss is reconstruction error (MSE)