Nearest Neighbor Matching for Deep Clustering

Deep clustering gradually becomes an important branch in unsupervised learning methods. However, current approaches hardly take into consideration the semantic sample relationships that existed in both local and global features. In addition, since the deep features are updated on-the-fly, relying on these sample relationships may construct more semantically confident sample pairs, leading to inferior performance. To tackle this issue, we propose a method called Nearest Neighbor Matching (NNM) to match samples with their nearest neighbors from both local (batch) and global (overall) levels. Specifically, for the local level, we match the nearest neighbors based on batch embedded features, as for the global one, we match neighbors from overall embedded features. To keep the clustering assignment consistent in both neighbors and classes, we frame consistent loss and class contrastive loss for both local and global levels. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our new model against state-of-the-art methods. Particularly on the STL-10 dataset, our method can achieve supervised performance. As for the CIFAR-100 dataset, our NNM leads 3.7% against the latest comparison method. Our code will be available at https://github.com/ZhiyuanDang/NNM.