Papers › SP²OT: Semantic-Regularized Progressive Partial Optimal Transport for Imbalanced Clustering

SP²OT: Semantic-Regularized Progressive Partial Optimal Transport for Imbalanced Clustering

4 Apr 2024arXiv:2404.03446archive 2025-07-28

Chuyu Zhang, Hui Ren, Xuming He

Deep clustering, which learns representation and semantic clustering without labels information, poses a great challenge for deep learning-based approaches. Despite significant progress in recent years, most existing methods focus on uniformly distributed datasets, significantly limiting the practical applicability of their methods. In this paper, we propose a more practical problem setting named deep imbalanced clustering, where the underlying classes exhibit an imbalance distribution. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel optimal transport-based pseudo-label learning framework. Our framework formulates pseudo-label generation as a Semantic-regularized Progressive Partial Optimal Transport (SP²OT) problem, which progressively transports each sample to imbalanced clusters under several prior distribution and semantic relation constraints, thus generating high-quality and imbalance-aware pseudo-labels. To solve SP²OT, we develop a Majorization-Minimization-based optimization algorithm. To be more precise, we employ the strategy of majorization to reformulate the SP²OT problem into a Progressive Partial Optimal Transport problem, which can be transformed into an unbalanced optimal transport problem with augmented constraints and can be solved efficiently by a fast matrix scaling algorithm. Experiments on various datasets, including a human-curated long-tailed CIFAR100, challenging ImageNet-R, and large-scale subsets of fine-grained iNaturalist2018 datasets, demonstrate the superiority of our method.

PaperPDFCode

Code

rhfeiyang/SPPOT officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ClusteringDeep ClusteringPseudo Label

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Focus

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections