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 paper introduced the concept of deep autoencoders for unsupervised pre-training of deep neural networks, laying the groundwork for modern autoencoder architectures.
Deep Learning, Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville, 2016 (MIT Press) - Chapter 14 provides a comprehensive discussion of autoencoders, detailing their components and various types.