# Contractive Autoencoder

> Source: https://sukruyusufkaya.com/en/glossary/contractive-autoencoder
> Updated: 2026-05-13T20:00:47.040Z
> Type: glossary
> Category: derin-ogrenme
**TLDR:** A type of autoencoder that uses an additional penalty to learn more stable latent representations under input perturbations.

<p>A contractive autoencoder focuses not only on reconstruction quality but also on the stability of latent representations under small input perturbations. Through a Jacobian-based penalty, it encourages learned representations to lie on smoother and more robust manifolds. This can help extract more meaningful latent structure in noisy or sensitive datasets.</p>