In this paper, we propose a recurrent framework for Joint Unsupervised LEarning (JULE) of deep representations and image clusters. In our framework, successive operations in a clustering algorithm are expressed as steps in a recurrent process, stacked on top of representations output by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). During training, image clusters and representations are updated jointly: image clustering is conducted in the forward pass, while representation learning in the backward pass. Our key idea behind this framework is that good representations are beneficial to image clustering and clustering results provide supervisory signals to representation learning. By integrating two processes into a single model with a unified weighted triplet loss and optimizing it end-to-end, we can obtain not only more powerful representations, but also more precise image clusters. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on image clustering across a variety of image datasets. Moreover, the learned representations generalize well when transferred to other tasks.
A number of works have explored combining image clustering with representation learning. In @cite_2 , the authors proposed to learn a non-linear embedding of the undirected affinity graph using stacked autoencoder, and then ran K-means in the embedding space to obtain clusters. In @cite_13 , a deep semi-NMF model was used to factorize the input into multiple stacking factors which are initialized and updated layer by layer. Using the representations on the top layer, K-means was implemented to get the final results. Unlike our work, they do not jointly optimize for the representation learning and clustering.
@cite_13 @cite_2
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Clustering is a fundamental technique widely used for exploring the inherent data structure in pattern recognition and machine learning. Most of the existing methods focus on modeling the similarity dissimilarity relationship among instances, such as k-means and spectral clustering, and ignore to extract more effective representation for clustering. In this paper, we propose a deep embedding network for representation learning, which is more beneficial for clustering by considering two constraints on learned representations. We first utilize a deep auto encoder to learn the reduced representations from the raw data. To make the learned representations suitable for clustering, we first impose a locality-persevering constraint on the learned representations, which aims to embed original data into its underlying manifold space. Then, different from spectral clustering which extracts representations from the block diagonal similarity matrix, we apply a group sparsity constraint for the learned representations, and aim to learn block diagonal representations in which the nonzero groups correspond to its cluster. After obtaining the learned representations, we use k-means to cluster them. To evaluate the proposed deep embedding network, we compare its performance with k-means and spectral clustering on three commonly-used datasets. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves promising performance. The real world image databases such as Flickr are characterized by continuous addition of new images. The recent approaches for image annotation, i.e. the problem of assigning tags to images, have two major drawbacks. First, either models are learned using the entire training data, or to handle the issue of dataset imbalance, tag-specific discriminative models are trained. Such models become obsolete and require relearning when new images and tags are added to database. Second, the task of feature-fusion is typically dealt using ad-hoc approaches. In this paper, we present a weighted extension of Multi-view Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to address the aforementioned drawbacks. The key idea is to learn query-specific generative model on the features of nearest-neighbors and tags using the proposed NMF-KNN approach which imposes consensus constraint on the coefficient matrices across different features. This results in coefficient vectors across features to be consistent and, thus, naturally solves the problem of feature fusion, while the weight matrices introduced in the proposed formulation alleviate the issue of dataset imbalance. Furthermore, our approach, being query-specific, is unaffected by addition of images and tags in a database. We tested our method on two datasets used for evaluation of image annotation and obtained competitive results. Semi-NMF is a matrix factorization technique that learns a low-dimensional representation of a dataset that lends itself to a clustering interpretation. It is possible that the mapping between this new representation and our original features contains rather complex hierarchical information with implicit lower-level hidden attributes, that classical one level clustering methodologies can not interpret. In this work we propose a novel model, Deep Semi-NMF, that is able to learn such hidden representations that allow themselves to an interpretation of clustering according to different, unknown attributes of a given dataset. We show that by doing so, our model is able to learn low-dimensional representations that are better suited for clustering, outperforming Semi-NMF, but also other NMF variants. Clustering is essential to many tasks in pattern recognition and computer vision. With the advent of deep learning, there is an increasing interest in learning deep unsupervised representations for clustering analysis. Many works on this domain rely on variants of auto-encoders and use the encoder outputs as representations features for clustering. In this paper, we show that an l2 normalization constraint on these representations during auto-encoder training, makes the representations more separable and compact in the Euclidean space after training. This greatly improves the clustering accuracy when k-means clustering is employed on the representations. We also propose a clustering based unsupervised anomaly detection method using l2 normalized deep auto-encoder representations. We show the effect of l2 normalization on anomaly detection accuracy. We further show that the proposed anomaly detection method greatly improves accuracy compared to previously proposed deep methods such as reconstruction error based anomaly detection.