In this paper, we propose a recurrent framework for joint unsupervised learning of deep representations and image clusters. In our framework, successive operations in a clustering algorithm are expressed as steps in a recurrent process, stacked on top of representations output by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). During training, image clusters and representations are updated jointly: image clustering is conducted in the forward pass, while representation learning in the backward pass. Our key idea behind this framework is that good representations are beneficial to image clustering and clustering results provide supervisory signals to representation learning. By integrating two processes into a single model with a unified weighted triplet loss and optimizing it end-to-end, we can obtain not only more powerful representations, but also more precise image clusters. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on image clustering across a variety of image datasets. Moreover, the learned representations generalize well when transferred to other tasks.

在本论文中，我们提出了一种循环框架用于深度表示和图像聚类的联合无监督学习(JULE)。通过在卷积神经网络(CNN)输出的表示层上堆叠聚类算法的连续操作的循环过程，在前向传递中进行图像聚类，在后向传递中进行表示学习。我们的主要想法是将两个过程集成到一个模型中，该模型具有统一加权的三元组损失函数，并进行端到端的优化，从而获得更强大的表示和更精确的图像聚类。在广泛的实验中，该方法在各种图像数据集的图像聚类中表现优于现有技术，并且学习到的表示在转移到其他任务时具有很好的通用性。