Adaptive Self-paced Deep Clustering with Data Augmentation

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Deep clustering gains superior performance than conventional clustering by jointly performing feature learning and cluster assignment. Although numerous deep clustering algorithms have emerged in various applications, most of them fail to learn robust cluster-oriented features which in turn hurts the final clustering performance. To solve this problem, we propose a two-stage deep clustering algorithm by incorporating data augmentation and self-paced learning. Specifically, in the first stage, we learn robust features by training an autoencoder with examples that are augmented by random shifting and rotating the given clean examples. Then, in the second stage, we encourage the learned features to be cluster-oriented by alternatively finetuning the encoder with the augmented examples and updating the cluster assignments of the clean examples. During finetuning the encoder, the target of each augmented example in the loss function is the center of the cluster to which the clean example is assigned. The targets may be computed incorrectly, and the examples with incorrect targets could mislead the encoder network. To stabilize the network training, we select most confident examples in each iteration by utilizing the adaptive self-paced learning. Extensive experiments validate that our algorithm outperforms the state of the arts on four image datasets.