Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning by Online Constrained K-Means

Qi Qian, Yuanhong Xu, Juhua Hu, Hao Li, Rong Jin; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 16640-16649

Cluster discrimination is an effective pretext task for unsupervised representation learning, which often consists of two phases: clustering and discrimination. Clustering is to assign each instance a pseudo label that will be used to learn representations in discrimination. The main challenge resides in clustering since prevalent clustering methods (e.g., k-means) have to run in a batch mode. Besides, there can be a trivial solution consisting of a dominating cluster. To address these challenges, we first investigate the objective of clustering-based representation learning. Based on this, we propose a novel clustering-based pretext task with online Constrained K-means (CoKe). Compared with the balanced clustering that each cluster has exactly the same size, we only constrain the minimal size of each cluster to flexibly capture the inherent data structure. More importantly, our online assignment method has a theoretical guarantee to approach the global optimum. By decoupling clustering and discrimination, CoKe can achieve competitive performance when optimizing with only a single view from each instance. Extensive experiments on ImageNet and other benchmark data sets verify both the efficacy and efficiency of our proposal.