Learning Neural Models for End-to-End Clustering

We propose a novel end-to-end neural network architecture that, once trained, directly outputs a probabilistic clustering of a batch of input examples in one pass. It estimates a distribution over the number of clusters k, and for each \(1 \le k \le k_\mathrm {max}\), a distribution over the individual cluster assignment for each data point. The network is trained in advance in a supervised fashion on separate data to learn grouping by any perceptual similarity criterion based on pairwise labels (same/different group). It can then be applied to different data containing different groups. We demonstrate promising performance on high-dimensional data like images (COIL-100) and speech (TIMIT). We call this “learning to cluster” and show its conceptual difference to deep metric learning, semi-supervise clustering and other related approaches while having the advantage of performing learnable clustering fully end-to-end.