<p>I think serialization for the ANN code would be great, but I don't know if <a href="https://github.com/zoq" class="user-mention">@zoq</a> has any plans for it already.</p>
<p>To the best of my understanding, you should be able to implement a sparse autoencoder as an FNN just like you said.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think it would not be able to do that, I wrote the reasons at here!. Either the layer of ANN need to do some changes and apply type_traits + static_assert to tell the users "this layer is a bad choice" or create a new folder to collect meaningful layer for autoencoder(but this would generate duplicate codes).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I remember you writing that, I just wanted to make sure that was the only reason. I think there are a couple ways to go here---type_traits with a static_assert could be a good way to warn users, or, you can provide template typedefs so that the user is generally not building their own autoencoder, but instead just using the pre-existing <code>SparseAutoencoder</code> typedef. i.e.</p>
<pre><code>using SparseAutoencoder = FNN<...>;
using DenoisingAutoencoder = FNN<...>; // with the FNN class, maybe other types of autoencoders are easy too and can be provided in the future
</code></pre>
<p>Do you think that's a better solution? This allows regular users the flexibility to do whatever they want by defining their own <code>FNN<...></code> for a custom autoencoder, and users who just want to use a standard sparse autoencoder can use the <code>SparseAutoencoder</code> typedef (or whatever other types of autoencoders end up being available).</p>
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