  We present the discriminative recurrent sparse auto-encoder model, comprising
a recurrent encoder of rectified linear units, unrolled for a fixed number of
iterations, and connected to two linear decoders that reconstruct the input and
predict its supervised classification. Training via
backpropagation-through-time initially minimizes an unsupervised sparse
reconstruction error; the loss function is then augmented with a discriminative
term on the supervised classification. The depth implicit in the
temporally-unrolled form allows the system to exhibit all the power of deep
networks, while substantially reducing the number of trainable parameters.
  From an initially unstructured network the hidden units differentiate into
categorical-units, each of which represents an input prototype with a
well-defined class; and part-units representing deformations of these
prototypes. The learned organization of the recurrent encoder is hierarchical:
part-units are driven directly by the input, whereas the activity of
categorical-units builds up over time through interactions with the part-units.
Even using a small number of hidden units per layer, discriminative recurrent
sparse auto-encoders achieve excellent performance on MNIST.
