Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - Provides a comprehensive explanation of autoencoders, including undercomplete autoencoders, the role of latent space, and methods for selecting its dimension.
Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks, Geoffrey E. Hinton, Ruslan R. Salakhutdinov, 2006Science, Vol. 313 (American Association for the Advancement of Science)DOI: 10.1126/science.1127647 - A foundational paper introducing the concept of using deep autoencoders for effective dimensionality reduction, laying the groundwork for latent space learning.
Autoencoders, Unsupervised Learning, and Deep Architectures, Pierre Baldi, 2012Proceedings of ICML Workshop on Unsupervised and Transfer Learning, Vol. 27 (PMLR) - A survey providing foundational concepts of autoencoders, discussing the role of the bottleneck layer in learning compressed representations and various architectural considerations.