Reducing the Dimensionality of Data with Neural Networks, Geoffrey E. Hinton and Ruslan R. Salakhutdinov, 2006Science, Vol. 313 (American Association for the Advancement of Science)DOI: 10.1126/science.1127647 - This foundational paper introduces deep autoencoders, which are crucial for dimensionality reduction and understanding the role of the encoder in learning efficient data representations.
Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - A standard textbook that provides detailed coverage of core deep learning concepts, including various network architectures (MLPs, CNNs), activation functions, and training regularization, all directly applicable to designing encoder networks.