  Representation learning is a fundamental but challenging problem, especially
when the distribution of data is unknown. We propose a new representation
learning method, termed Structure Transfer Machine (STM), which enables feature
learning process to converge at the representation expectation in a
probabilistic way. We theoretically show that such an expected value of the
representation (mean) is achievable if the manifold structure can be
transferred from the data space to the feature space. The resulting structure
regularization term, named manifold loss, is incorporated into the loss
function of the typical deep learning pipeline. The STM architecture is
constructed to enforce the learned deep representation to satisfy the intrinsic
manifold structure from the data, which results in robust features that suit
various application scenarios, such as digit recognition, image classification
and object tracking. Compared to state-of-the-art CNN architectures, we achieve
the better results on several commonly used benchmarks\footnote{The source code
is available. https://github.com/stmstmstm/stm }.
