Lifelong Spectral Clustering

TL;DR

Lifelong Spectral Clustering (L2SC) introduces a framework that continually learns and transfers knowledge across multiple clustering tasks, improving spectral clustering performance over time by leveraging accumulated experience.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel lifelong learning approach for spectral clustering, incorporating knowledge transfer via basis and feature libraries, and an online update mechanism for continual learning.

Findings

L2SC outperforms state-of-the-art spectral clustering methods on benchmark datasets.

The model effectively transfers knowledge to improve clustering accuracy.

Empirical results validate the continual learning capability of L2SC.

Abstract

In the past decades, spectral clustering (SC) has become one of the most effective clustering algorithms. However, most previous studies focus on spectral clustering tasks with a fixed task set, which cannot incorporate with a new spectral clustering task without accessing to previously learned tasks. In this paper, we aim to explore the problem of spectral clustering in a lifelong machine learning framework, i.e., Lifelong Spectral Clustering (L2SC). Its goal is to efficiently learn a model for a new spectral clustering task by selectively transferring previously accumulated experience from knowledge library. Specifically, the knowledge library of L2SC contains two components: 1) orthogonal basis library: capturing latent cluster centers among the clusters in each pair of tasks; 2) feature embedding library: embedding the feature manifold information shared among multiple related tasks. As a new spectral clustering task arrives, L2SC firstly transfers knowledge from both basis library and feature library to obtain encoding matrix, and further redefines the library base over time to maximize performance across all the clustering tasks. Meanwhile, a general online update formulation is derived to alternatively update the basis library and feature library. Finally, the empirical experiments on several real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that our L2SC model can effectively improve the clustering performance when comparing with other state-of-the-art spectral clustering algorithms.