Uncertainty-aware Correspondence Distillation for Deep Image Clustering

Image clustering is a challenging task in computer vision, with performance heavily dependent on the quality of feature representations due to the inherent complexity of images. However, current image clustering methods overlook the underlying semantic information during representation learning, leading to low-quality feature representations. Moreover, the absence of ground-truth labels amplifies the detrimental effects of unreliable data on semantic guidance, steering the model towards incorrect learning directions. In this work, we propose a novel deep image clustering method named Uncertainty-aware Correspondence Distillation (UCD) to address these issues. Specifically, we introduce the concept of representation correspondence to establish cross-level connections between instances and semantics, which is further employed as a distillation target to improve the network’s feature learning by complementing semantic information. To mitigate unnecessary similarity penalties arising from unreliable data, we develop robust dynamic weights for semantic guidance by modeling the uncertainty of image semantics. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The code is available at https://github.com/YL616/UCD.