Invariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentation

We present a novel clustering objective that learns a neural network classifier from scratch, given only unlabelled data samples. The model discovers clusters that accurately match semantic classes, achieving state-of-the-art results in eight unsupervised clustering benchmarks spanning image classif...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ji, X, Henriques, J, Vedaldi, A
Format: Conference item
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2020
_version_ 1826292896638173184
author Ji, X
Henriques, J
Vedaldi, A
author_facet Ji, X
Henriques, J
Vedaldi, A
author_sort Ji, X
collection OXFORD
description We present a novel clustering objective that learns a neural network classifier from scratch, given only unlabelled data samples. The model discovers clusters that accurately match semantic classes, achieving state-of-the-art results in eight unsupervised clustering benchmarks spanning image classification and segmentation. These include STL10, an unsupervised variant of ImageNet, and CIFAR10, where we significantly beat the accuracy of our closest competitors by 6.6 and 9.5 absolute percentage points respectively. The method is not specialised to computer vision and operates on any paired dataset samples; in our experiments we use random transforms to obtain a pair from each image. The trained network directly outputs semantic labels, rather than high dimensional representations that need external processing to be usable for semantic clustering. The objective is simply to maximise mutual information between the class assignments of each pair. It is easy to implement and rigorously grounded in information theory, meaning we effortlessly avoid degenerate solutions that other clustering methods are susceptible to. In addition to the fully unsupervised mode, we also test two semi-supervised settings. The first achieves 88.8% accuracy on STL10 classification, setting a new global state-of-the-art over all existing methods (whether supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised). The second shows robustness to 90% reductions in label coverage, of relevance to applications that wish to make use of small amounts of labels. github.com/xu-ji/IIC
first_indexed 2024-03-07T03:21:46Z
format Conference item
id oxford-uuid:b7abbed8-9223-45af-9764-67853b15d4a2
institution University of Oxford
language English
last_indexed 2024-03-07T03:21:46Z
publishDate 2020
publisher IEEE
record_format dspace
spelling oxford-uuid:b7abbed8-9223-45af-9764-67853b15d4a22022-03-27T04:50:20ZInvariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentationConference itemhttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_5794uuid:b7abbed8-9223-45af-9764-67853b15d4a2EnglishSymplectic Elements at OxfordIEEE2020Ji, XHenriques, JVedaldi, AWe present a novel clustering objective that learns a neural network classifier from scratch, given only unlabelled data samples. The model discovers clusters that accurately match semantic classes, achieving state-of-the-art results in eight unsupervised clustering benchmarks spanning image classification and segmentation. These include STL10, an unsupervised variant of ImageNet, and CIFAR10, where we significantly beat the accuracy of our closest competitors by 6.6 and 9.5 absolute percentage points respectively. The method is not specialised to computer vision and operates on any paired dataset samples; in our experiments we use random transforms to obtain a pair from each image. The trained network directly outputs semantic labels, rather than high dimensional representations that need external processing to be usable for semantic clustering. The objective is simply to maximise mutual information between the class assignments of each pair. It is easy to implement and rigorously grounded in information theory, meaning we effortlessly avoid degenerate solutions that other clustering methods are susceptible to. In addition to the fully unsupervised mode, we also test two semi-supervised settings. The first achieves 88.8% accuracy on STL10 classification, setting a new global state-of-the-art over all existing methods (whether supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised). The second shows robustness to 90% reductions in label coverage, of relevance to applications that wish to make use of small amounts of labels. github.com/xu-ji/IIC
spellingShingle Ji, X
Henriques, J
Vedaldi, A
Invariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentation
title Invariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentation
title_full Invariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentation
title_fullStr Invariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentation
title_full_unstemmed Invariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentation
title_short Invariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentation
title_sort invariant information clustering for unsupervised image classification and segmentation
work_keys_str_mv AT jix invariantinformationclusteringforunsupervisedimageclassificationandsegmentation
AT henriquesj invariantinformationclusteringforunsupervisedimageclassificationandsegmentation
AT vedaldia invariantinformationclusteringforunsupervisedimageclassificationandsegmentation