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Learning Latent Representations in Neural Networks for Clustering through Pseudo Supervision and Graph-based Activity Regularization

8 Feb 2018ICLR 2018 1arXiv:1802.03063archive 2025-07-28

Ozsel Kilinc, Ismail Uysal

In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised clustering approach exploiting the hidden information that is indirectly introduced through a pseudo classification objective. Specifically, we randomly assign a pseudo parent-class label to each observation which is then modified by applying the domain specific transformation associated with the assigned label. Generated pseudo observation-label pairs are subsequently used to train a neural network with Auto-clustering Output Layer (ACOL) that introduces multiple softmax nodes for each pseudo parent-class. Due to the unsupervised objective based on Graph-based Activity Regularization (GAR) terms, softmax duplicates of each parent-class are specialized as the hidden information captured through the help of domain specific transformations is propagated during training. Ultimately we obtain a k-means friendly latent representation. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the chosen transformation type impacts performance and helps propagate the latent information that is useful in revealing unknown clusters. Our results show state-of-the-art performance for unsupervised clustering tasks on MNIST, SVHN and USPS datasets, with the highest accuracies reported to date in the literature.

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Tasks

ClusteringUnsupervised Image Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Unsupervised Image Classification MNIST ACOL + GAR + k-means Accuracy 98.32 #2 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Image Classification SVHN ACOL-GAR # of clusters (k) 10 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Unsupervised Image Classification SVHN ACOL-GAR Acc 76.80 #1 of 4 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Softmax

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