Deep Online Probability Aggregation Clustering

Combining machine clustering with deep models has shown remarkable superiority in deep clustering. It modifies the data processing pipeline into two alternating phases: feature clustering and model training. However, such alternating schedules may lead to instability and computational burden issues. To tackle these problems, we propose a centerless clustering algorithm called Probability Aggregation Clustering (PAC), enabling easy deployment in online deep clustering. PAC circumvents the cluster center and aligns the probability space and distribution space by formulating clustering as an optimization problem with a novel objective function. Based on the computation mechanism of the PAC, we propose a general online probability aggregation module to perform stable and flexible feature clustering over mini-batch data and further construct a deep visual clustering framework deep PAC (DPAC). Extensive experiments demonstrate that DPAC remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-art deep clustering methods (The code is available at https://github.com/aomandechenai/Deep-Probability-Aggregation-Clustering).