One of the biggest mental sinkholes into which AI students can get trapped is not quite understanding the fundamental difference between how our two basic “building block” networks operate: the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), trained with backpropagation (or any form of gradient descent learning), and the (restricted) Boltzmann machine (RBM), trained with contrastive divergence. It’s easy… Continue reading When a Classifier Acts as an Autoencoder, and an Autoencoder Acts as a Classifier (Part 1 of 3)