Oracle-guided Contrastive Clustering

TL;DR

This paper introduces Oracle-guided Contrastive Clustering (OCC), a novel deep clustering framework that interactively incorporates oracle feedback to achieve personalized, orientation-aware clustering results, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes the first deep framework for personalized clustering guided by oracle feedback, integrating active learning with contrastive learning for orientation-aware clustering.

Findings

OCC effectively clusters data along specific orientations.

OCC outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods.

Theoretical clustering risk bounds are tighter with active queries.

Abstract

Deep clustering aims to learn a clustering representation through deep architectures. Most of the existing methods usually conduct clustering with the unique goal of maximizing clustering performance, that ignores the personalized demand of clustering tasks.% and results in unguided clustering solutions. However, in real scenarios, oracles may tend to cluster unlabeled data by exploiting distinct criteria, such as distinct semantics (background, color, object, etc.), and then put forward personalized clustering tasks. To achieve task-aware clustering results, in this study, Oracle-guided Contrastive Clustering(OCC) is then proposed to cluster by interactively making pairwise ``same-cluster" queries to oracles with distinctive demands. Specifically, inspired by active learning, some informative instance pairs are queried, and evaluated by oracles whether the pairs are in the same cluster according to their desired orientation. And then these queried same-cluster pairs extend the set of positive instance pairs for contrastive learning, guiding OCC to extract orientation-aware feature representation. Accordingly, the query results, guided by oracles with distinctive demands, may drive the OCC's clustering results in a desired orientation. Theoretically, the clustering risk in an active learning manner is given with a tighter upper bound, that guarantees active queries to oracles do mitigate the clustering risk. Experimentally, extensive results verify that OCC can cluster accurately along the specific orientation and it substantially outperforms the SOTA clustering methods as well. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first deep framework to perform personalized clustering.