Can pretrained models generalize to new datasets without any retraining? We deploy pretrained image models on datasets they were not trained for, and investigate whether their embeddings form meaningful clusters. Our suite of benchmarking experiments uses encoders pretrained solely on ImageNet-1k with either supervised or self-supervised training techniques, deployed on image datasets that were not seen during training, and clustered with conventional clustering algorithms. This evaluation provides new insights into the embeddings of self-supervised models, which prioritize different features to supervised models. We find evidence that supervised encoders offer more utility than SSL encoders within the training domain, and vice-versa far outside of it. However, fine-tuning SSL encoders for ImageNet-1k classification results in the opposite behaviour, with better performance than supervised-only models on in-domain and decreased performance on far out of domain data - worse at far-OOD than either SSL-only or supervised-only models. Clustering provides a way to evaluate the utility of self-supervised learnt representations orthogonal to existing feature quality estimation methods. Additionally, we find the silhouette score when measured in a UMAP-reduced space is highly correlated with clustering performance, and can therefore be used as a proxy for clustering performance on data with no ground truth labels. Our code implementation is available at https://github.com/scottclowe/zs-ssl-clustering/.
Unsupervised hashing methods have attracted widespread attention with the explosive growth of large-scale data, which can greatly reduce storage and computation by learning compact binary codes. Existing unsupervised hashing methods attempt to exploit the valuable information from samples, which fails to take the local geometric structure of unlabeled samples into consideration. Moreover, hashing based on auto-encoders aims to minimize the reconstruction loss between the input data and binary codes, which ignores the potential consistency and complementarity of multiple sources data. To addres…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）
Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize unseen classes based on the knowledge of seen classes. Previous methods focused on learning direct embeddings from global features to the semantic space in hope of knowledge transfer from seen classes to unseen classes. However, an unseen class shares local visual features with a set of seen classes and leveraging global visual features makes the knowledge transfer ineffective. To tackle this problem, we propose a Region Semantically Aligned Network (RSAN), which maps local features of unseen classes to their semantic attributes. Instead of using glob…
Deep Subspace Clustering Networks (DSC) provide an efficient solution to the problem of unsupervised subspace clustering by using an undercomplete deep auto-encoder with a fully-connected layer to exploit the self expressiveness property. This method uses undercomplete representations of the input data which makes it not so robust and more dependent on pre-training. To overcome this, we propose a simple yet efficient alternative method - Overcomplete Deep Subspace Clustering Networks (ODSC) where we use overcomplete representations for subspace clustering. In our proposed method, we fuse the f…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Determining the best partition for a dataset can be a challenging task because of 1) the lack of a priori information within an unsupervised learning framework; and 2) the absence of a unique clustering validation approach to evaluate clustering solutions. Here we present reval: a Python package that leverages stability-based relative clustering validation methods to determine best clustering solutions as the ones that best generalize to unseen data. Statistical software, both in R and Python, usually rely on internal validation metrics, such as silhouette, to select the number of clusters tha…
Deep Multi-View Semi-Supervised Clustering with Sample Pairwise Constraints
College of Information Science and Technology, Hainan University（海南大学信息科学技术学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Hainan University（海南大学）
Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
With the powerful learning ability of deep convolutional networks, deep clustering methods can extract the most discriminative information from individual data and produce more satisfactory clustering results. However, existing deep clustering methods usually ignore the relationship between the data. Fortunately, the graph convolutional network can handle such relationship, opening up a new research direction for deep clustering. In this paper, we propose a cross-attention based deep clustering framework, named Cross-Attention Fusion based Enhanced Graph Convolutional Network (CaEGCN), which c…
In this paper, we consider the problem of multi-view clustering on incomplete views. Compared with complete multi-view clustering, the view-missing problem increases the difficulty of learning common representations from different views. To address the challenge, we propose a novel incomplete multi-view clustering framework, which incorporates cross-view relation transfer and multi-view fusion learning. Specifically, based on the consistency existing in multi-view data, we devise a cross-view relation transfer-based completion module, which transfers known similar inter-instance relationships …
In daily life, graphic symbols, such as traffic signs and brand logos, are ubiquitously utilized around us due to its intuitive expression beyond language boundary. We tackle an open-set graphic symbol recognition problem by one-shot classification with prototypical images as a single training example for each novel class. We take an approach to learn a generalizable embedding space for novel tasks. We propose a new approach called variational prototyping-encoder (VPE) that learns the image translation task from real-world input images to their corresponding prototypical images as a meta-task.…
Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院数学与系统科学研究院）；University of Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；CAS Centre for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）
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 $k$-means scores. At initial stages of the learning procedure, the rep…
CITEC cluster of excellence（CITEC卓越集群）；Bielefeld University（比勒费尔德大学）
There exist many approaches for description and recognition of unseen classes in datasets. Nevertheless, it becomes a challenging problem when we deal with multivariate time-series (MTS) (e.g., motion data), where we cannot apply the vectorial algorithms directly to the inputs. In this work, we propose a novel multiple-kernel dictionary learning (MKD) which learns semantic attributes based on specific combinations of MTS dimensions in the feature space. Hence, MKD can fully/partially reconstructs the unseen classes based on the training data (seen classes). Furthermore, we obtain sparse encodi…
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 accura…
Clustering is an unsupervised data mining technique that can be employed to segment customers. The efficient clustering of customers enables banks to design and make offers based on the features of the target customers. The present study uses a real-world financial dataset (Berka, 2000) to cluster bank customers by an encoder-decoder network and the dynamic time warping (DTW) method. The customer features required for clustering are obtained in four ways: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), Recency Frequency and Monetary (RFM), LSTM encoder-decoder network, and our proposed hybrid method. Once the LST…
Subspace clustering aims to cluster unlabeled data that lies in a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces. Deep subspace clustering approaches based on auto-encoders have become very popular to solve subspace clustering problems. However, the training of current deep methods converges slowly, which is much less efficient than traditional approaches. We propose a Residual Encoder-Decoder network for deep Subspace Clustering (RED-SC), which symmetrically links convolutional and deconvolutional layers with skip-layer connections, with which the training converges much faster. We use a self-expr…
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
State-of-the-art approaches for clustering high-dimensional data utilize deep auto-encoder architectures. Many of these networks require a large number of parameters and suffer from a lack of interpretability, due to the black-box nature of the auto-encoders. We introduce Mixture Model Auto-Encoders (MixMate), a novel architecture that clusters data by performing inference on a generative model. Derived from the perspective of sparse dictionary learning and mixture models, MixMate comprises several auto-encoders, each tasked with reconstructing data in a distinct cluster, while enforcing spars…
University of Quebec at Montreal（魁北克大学蒙特利尔分校）；University of Bahrain（巴林大学）
Most recent graph clustering methods have resorted to Graph Auto-Encoders (GAEs) to perform joint clustering and embedding learning. However, two critical issues have been overlooked. First, the accumulative error, inflicted by learning with noisy clustering assignments, degrades the effectiveness and robustness of the clustering model. This problem is called Feature Randomness. Second, reconstructing the adjacency matrix sets the model to learn irrelevant similarities for the clustering task. This problem is called Feature Drift. Interestingly, the theoretical relation between the aforementio…
Clustering is one of the most fundamental tasks in data analysis and machine learning. It is central to many data-driven applications that aim to separate the data into groups with similar patterns. Moreover, clustering is a complex procedure that is affected significantly by the choice of the data representation method. Recent research has demonstrated encouraging clustering results by learning effectively these representations. In most of these works a deep auto-encoder is initially pre-trained to minimize a reconstruction loss, and then jointly optimized with clustering centroids in order t…
The paper has been withdrawn since more effective experiments should be completed. Auto-encoders (AE) has been widely applied in different fields of machine learning. However, as a deep model, there are a large amount of learnable parameters in the AE, which would cause over-fitting and slow learning speed in practice. Many researchers have been study the intrinsic structure of AE and showed different useful methods to regularize those parameters. In this paper, we present a novel regularization method based on a clustering algorithm which is able to classify the parameters into different grou…
Graph clustering, aiming to partition nodes of a graph into various groups via an unsupervised approach, is an attractive topic in recent years. To improve the representative ability, several graph auto-encoder (GAE) models, which are based on semi-supervised graph convolution networks (GCN), have been developed and they achieve good results compared with traditional clustering methods. However, all existing methods either fail to utilize the orthogonal property of the representations generated by GAE, or separate the clustering and the learning of neural networks. We first prove that the rela…
While GAN is a powerful model for generating images, its inability to infer a latent space directly limits its use in applications requiring an encoder. Our paper presents a simple architectural setup that combines the generative capabilities of GAN with an encoder. We accomplish this by combining the encoder with the discriminator using shared weights, then training them simultaneously using a new loss term. We model the output of the encoder latent space via a GMM, which leads to both good clustering using this latent space and improved image generation by the GAN. Our framework is generic a…
Adaptive Graph Auto-Encoder for General Data Clustering
School of Artificial Intelligence, Optics and Electronics (iOPEN), Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学人工智能、光学与电子学院（iOPEN））；Key Laboratory of Intelligent Interaction and Applications (Northwestern Polytechnical University), Ministry of Industry and Information Technology（工业和信息化部智能交互与应用重点实验室（西北工业大学））
Clustering using deep neural network models have been extensively studied in recent years. Among the most popular frameworks are the VAE and GAN frameworks, which learns latent feature representations of data through encoder / decoder neural net structures. This is a suitable base for clustering tasks, as the latent space often seems to effectively capture the inherent essence of data, simplifying its manifold and reducing noise. In this article, the VAE framework is used to investigate how probability function gradient ascent over data points can be used to process data in order to achieve be…
Conditional generative models have achieved considerable success in the past few years, but usually require a lot of labeled data. Recently, ClusterGAN combines GAN with an encoder to achieve remarkable clustering performance via unsupervised conditional generation. However, it ignores the real conditional distribution of data, which leads to generating less diverse samples for each class and makes the encoder only achieve sub-optimal clustering performance. Here, we propose a new unsupervised conditional generation framework, Double Cycle-Consistent Conditional GAN (DC3-GAN), which can genera…
The overwhelming presence of categorical/sequential data in diverse domains emphasizes the importance of sequence mining. The challenging nature of sequences proves the need for continuing research to find a more accurate and faster approach providing a better understanding of their (dis)similarities. This paper proposes a new Model-based approach for clustering sequence data, namely nTreeClus. The proposed method deploys Tree-based Learners, k-mers, and autoregressive models for categorical time series, culminating with a novel numerical representation of the categorical sequences. Adopting t…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
Auto-Encoder (AE)-based deep subspace clustering (DSC) methods have achieved impressive performance due to the powerful representation extracted using deep neural networks while prioritizing categorical separability. However, self-reconstruction loss of an AE ignores rich useful relation information and might lead to indiscriminative representation, which inevitably degrades the clustering performance. It is also challenging to learn high-level similarity without feeding semantic labels. Another unsolved problem facing DSC is the huge memory cost due to $n\times n$ similarity matrix, which is …
THESAURUS: Contrastive Graph Clustering by Swapping Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Couplings
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Systems Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学系统科学与工程学院）
ConTraIRL: Factorized Contrastive Abstractions for Transferable IRL
School of Computing University of Georgia（乔治亚大学计算学院）；School of Computing Sciences & Computer Engineering The University of Southern Mississippi（密西西比大学计算科学与计算机工程学院）
Clustering is one of the most fundamental and wide-spread techniques in exploratory data analysis. Yet, the basic approach to clustering has not really changed: a practitioner hand-picks a task-specific clustering loss to optimize and fit the given data to reveal the underlying cluster structure. Some types of losses---such as k-means, or its non-linear version: kernelized k-means (centroid based), and DBSCAN (density based)---are popular choices due to their good empirical performance on a range of applications. Although every so often the clustering output using these standard losses fails t…
This paper concerns open-world classification, where the classifier not only needs to classify test examples into seen classes that have appeared in training but also reject examples from unseen or novel classes that have not appeared in training. Specifically, this paper focuses on discovering the hidden unseen classes of the rejected examples. Clearly, without prior knowledge this is difficult. However, we do have the data from the seen training classes, which can tell us what kind of similarity/difference is expected for examples from the same class or from different classes. It is reasonab…
Fast and Expressive Gesture Recognition using a Combination-Homomorphic Electromyogram Encoder
Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University（东北大学卡内基计算机科学学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University（东北大学电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Physical Therapy, Movement, and Rehabilitation Sciences, Northeastern University（东北大学物理治疗、运动与康复科学系）
TextME: Bridging Unseen Modalities Through Text Descriptions
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Ajou University, Suwon, South Korea；Division of Language \& AI, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea；Graduate School of AI, POSTECH, Pohang, Korea；Department of Software, Ajou University, Suwon, South Korea
Qianyuan Institute of Sciences（乾元科学研究所）；Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute（上海期智研究院）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
Learning generalizable policies that can adapt to unseen environments remains challenging in visual Reinforcement Learning (RL). Existing approaches try to acquire a robust representation via diversifying the appearances of in-domain observations for better generalization. Limited by the specific observations of the environment, these methods ignore the possibility of exploring diverse real-world image datasets. In this paper, we investigate how a visual RL agent would benefit from the off-the-shelf visual representations. Surprisingly, we find that the early layers in an ImageNet pre-trained …
We propose Deep Closed-Form Subspace Clustering (DCFSC), a new embarrassingly simple model for subspace clustering with learning non-linear mapping. Compared with the previous deep subspace clustering (DSC) techniques, our DCFSC does not have any parameters at all for the self-expressive layer. Instead, DCFSC utilizes the implicit data-driven self-expressive layer derived from closed-form shallow auto-encoder. Moreover, DCFSC also has no complicated optimization scheme, unlike the other subspace clustering methods. With its extreme simplicity, DCFSC has significant memory-related benefits over…
University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；University of New Mexico（新墨西哥大学）
Since its introduction, unsupervised representation learning has attracted a lot of attention from the research community, as it is demonstrated to be highly effective and easy-to-apply in tasks such as dimension reduction, clustering, visualization, information retrieval, and semi-supervised learning. In this work, we propose a novel unsupervised representation learning framework called neighbor-encoder, in which domain knowledge can be easily incorporated into the learning process without modifying the general encoder-decoder architecture of the classic autoencoder.In contrast to autoencoder…
