Traditional image clustering methods take a two-step approach, feature learning and clustering, sequentially. However, recent research results demonstrated that combining the separated phases in a unified framework and training them jointly can achieve a better performance. In this paper, we first introduce fully convolutional auto-encoders for image feature learning and then propose a unified clustering framework to learn image representations and cluster centers jointly based on a fully convolutional auto-encoder and soft @math -means scores. At initial stages of the learning procedure, the representations extracted from the auto-encoder may not be very discriminative for latter clustering. We address this issue by adopting a boosted discriminative distribution, where high score assignments are highlighted and low score ones are de-emphasized. With the gradually boosted discrimination, clustering assignment scores are discriminated and cluster purities are enlarged. Experiments on several vision benchmark datasets show that our methods can achieve a state-of-the-art performance.
@cite_35: Recently deep learning has been successfully adopted in many applications such as speech recognition and image classification. In this work, we explore the possibility of employing deep learning in graph clustering. We propose a simple method, which first learns a nonlinear embedding of the original graph by stacked autoencoder, and then runs k-means algorithm on the embedding to obtain clustering result. We show that this simple method has solid theoretical foundation, due to the similarity between autoencoder and spectral clustering in terms of what they actually optimize. Then, we demonstrate that the proposed method is more efficient and flexible than spectral clustering. First, the computational complexity of autoencoder is much lower than spectral clustering: the former can be linear to the number of nodes in a sparse graph while the latter is super quadratic due to eigenvalue decomposition. Second, when additional sparsity constraint is imposed, we can simply employ the sparse autoencoder developed in the literature of deep learning; however, it is nonstraightforward to implement a sparse spectral method. The experimental results on various graph datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms conventional spectral clustering, which clearly indicates the effectiveness of deep learning in graph clustering.
@cite_37: 
@cite_9: Linear or non-linear data transformations are widely used processing techniques in clustering. Usually, they are beneficial to enhancing data representation. However, if data have a complex structure, these techniques would be unsatisfying for clustering. In this paper, based on the auto-encoder network, which can learn a highly non-linear mapping function, we propose a new clustering method. Via simultaneously considering data reconstruction and compactness, our method can obtain stable and effective clustering. Experiments on three databases show that the proposed clustering model achieves excellent performance in terms of both accuracy and normalized mutual information.
@cite_31: We combine linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and K-means clustering into a coherent framework to adaptively select the most discriminative subspace. We use K-means clustering to generate class labels and use LDA to do subspace selection. The clustering process is thus integrated with the subspace selection process and the data are then simultaneously clustered while the feature subspaces are selected. We show the rich structure of the general LDA-Km framework by examining its variants and their relationships to earlier approaches. Relations among PCA, LDA, K-means are clarified. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.
@cite_16: 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.
@cite_13: Most learning approaches treat dimensionality reduction (DR) and clustering separately (i.e., sequentially), but recent research has shown that optimizing the two tasks jointly can substantially improve the performance of both. The premise behind the latter genre is that the data samples are obtained via linear transformation of latent representations that are easy to cluster; but in practice, the transformation from the latent space to the data can be more complicated. In this work, we assume that this transformation is an unknown and possibly nonlinear function. To recover the clustering-friendly' latent representations and to better cluster the data, we propose a joint DR and K-means clustering approach in which DR is accomplished via learning a deep neural network (DNN). The motivation is to keep the advantages of jointly optimizing the two tasks, while exploiting the deep neural network's ability to approximate any nonlinear function. This way, the proposed approach can work well for a broad class of generative models. Towards this end, we carefully design the DNN structure and the associated joint optimization criterion, and propose an effective and scalable algorithm to handle the formulated optimization problem. Experiments using different real datasets are employed to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Clustering has also been studied in the past years based on independent features extracted from auto-encoders (see, e.g. @cite_31 @cite_35 @cite_37 @cite_9 ). Recently, there are attempts to combine the auto-encoders and clustering in a unified framework @cite_16 @cite_13 . In @cite_16 , the authors proposed Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC) that learns deep representations and cluster assignments jointly. DEC uses a deep stacked auto-encoder to initialize the feature extraction model and a Kullback-Leibler divergence loss to fine-tune the unified model. In @cite_13 , the authors proposed Deep Clustering Network (DCN), a joint dimensional reduction and @math -means clustering framework. The dimensional reduction model is based on deep neural networks. Although these methods have achieved some success, they are not suitable for dealing with high-dimensional images due to the use of stacked auto-encoders rather than convolutional ones. This motivates us to design a unified clustering framework based on convolutional auto-encoders.