Deep clustering against self-supervised learning is a very important and promising direction for unsupervised visual representation learning since it requires little domain knowledge to design pretext tasks. However, the key component, embedding clustering, limits its extension to the extremely large-scale dataset due to its prerequisite to save the global latent embedding of the entire dataset. In this work, we aim to make this framework more simple and elegant without performance decline. We propose an unsupervised image classification framework without using embedding clustering, which is very similar to standard supervised training manner. For detailed interpretation, we further analyze its relation with deep clustering and contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on ImageNet dataset have been conducted to prove the effectiveness of our method. Furthermore, the experiments on transfer learning benchmarks have verified its generalization to other downstream tasks, including multi-label image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation and few-shot image classification.

本研究提出了一种无监督图像分类框架, 旨在通过不使用嵌入聚类来简化和优化深度聚类算法, 并在ImageNet数据集上进行了实验。同时验证了其在多标签图像分类，目标检测，语义分割等任务的泛化性，以及其在迁移学习中的有效性。

深度表示学习的无监督图像分类