Abstract A promising direction in deep learning research consists in learning representations and simultaneously discovering cluster structure in unlabeled data by optimizing a discriminative loss function. As opposed to supervised deep learning, this line of research is in its infancy, and how to design and optimize suitable loss functions to train deep neural networks for clustering is still an open question. Our contribution to this emerging field is a new deep clustering network that leverages the discriminative power of information-theoretic divergence measures, which have been shown to be effective in traditional clustering. We propose a novel loss function that incorporates geometric regularization constraints, thus avoiding degenerate structures of the resulting clustering partition. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and real datasets show that the proposed network achieves competitive performance with respect to other state-of-the-art methods, scales well to large datasets, and does not require pre-training steps.
To the best of our knowledge, DEC @cite_14 is the method that is most closely related to our approach, as it is also founded on traditional clustering approaches. DEC simultaneously learns a feature representation as well as a cluster assignment in a two-step procedure. In the first step, soft assignments are computed between the data and cluster centroids based on a Student's t-distribution. Then, the parameters are optimized by matching soft assignments to a target distribution, which expresses confidence in assignments. The matching is performed by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler divergence. However, the effectiveness of DEC depends on a pre-training step implemented with autoencoders and does require explicit feature design to handle complex image data, e.g., Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) features @cite_41 .
@cite_41 @cite_14
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Clustering is central to many data-driven application domains and has been studied extensively in terms of distance functions and grouping algorithms. Relatively little work has focused on learning representations for clustering. In this paper, we propose Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC), a method that simultaneously learns feature representations and cluster assignments using deep neural networks. DEC learns a mapping from the data space to a lower-dimensional feature space in which it iteratively optimizes a clustering objective. Our experimental evaluations on image and text corpora show significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Clustering is central to many data-driven application domains and has been studied extensively in terms of distance functions and grouping algorithms. Relatively little work has focused on learning representations for clustering. In this paper, we propose Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC), a method that simultaneously learns feature representations and cluster assignments using deep neural networks. DEC learns a mapping from the data space to a lower-dimensional feature space in which it iteratively optimizes a clustering objective. Our experimental evaluations on image and text corpora show significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Feature matters. How to train a deep network to acquire discriminative features across categories and polymerized features within classes has always been at the core of many computer vision tasks, specially for large-scale recognition systems where test identities are unseen during training and the number of classes could be at million scale. In this paper, we address this problem based on the simple intuition that the cosine distance of features in high-dimensional space should be close enough within one class and far away across categories. To this end, we proposed the congenerous cosine (COCO) algorithm to simultaneously optimize the cosine similarity among data. It inherits the softmax property to make inter-class features discriminative as well as shares the idea of class centroid in metric learning. Unlike previous work where the center is a temporal, statistical variable within one mini-batch during training, the formulated centroid is responsible for clustering inner-class features to enforce them polymerized around the network truncus. COCO is bundled with discriminative training and learned end-to-end with stable convergence. Experiments on five benchmarks have been extensively conducted to verify the effectiveness of our approach on both small-scale classification task and large-scale human recognition problem. Image clustering is a crucial but challenging task in machine learning and computer vision. Existing methods often ignore the combination between feature learning and clustering. To tackle this problem, we propose Deep Adaptive Clustering (DAC) that recasts the clustering problem into a binary pairwise-classification framework to judge whether pairs of images belong to the same clusters. In DAC, the similarities are calculated as the cosine distance between label features of images which are generated by a deep convolutional network (ConvNet). By introducing a constraint into DAC, the learned label features tend to be one-hot vectors that can be utilized for clustering images. The main challenge is that the ground-truth similarities are unknown in image clustering. We handle this issue by presenting an alternating iterative Adaptive Learning algorithm where each iteration alternately selects labeled samples and trains the ConvNet. Conclusively, images are automatically clustered based on the label features. Experimental results show that DAC achieves state-of-the-art performance on five popular datasets, e.g., yielding 97.75 clustering accuracy on MNIST, 52.18 on CIFAR-10 and 46.99 on STL-10.