text: We consider the problem of retrieving objects from image data and learning to classify them into meaningful semantic categories with minimal supervision. To that end, we propose a fully differentiable unsupervised deep clustering approach to learn semantic classes in an end-to-end fashion without individual class labeling using only unlabeled object proposals. The key contributions of our work are 1) a kmeans clustering objective where the clusters are learned as parameters of the network and are represented as memory units, and 2) simultaneously building a feature representation, or embedding, while learning to cluster it. This approach shows promising results on two popular computer vision datasets: on CIFAR10 for clustering objects, and on the more complex and challenging Cityscapes dataset for semantically discovering classes which visually correspond to cars, people, and bicycles. Currently, the only supervision provided is segmentation objectness masks, but this method can be extended to use an unsupervised objectness-based object generation mechanism which will make the approach completely unsupervised.
  @cite_23: This paper studies the convergence properties of the well known K-Means clustering algorithm. The K-Means algorithm can be described either as a gradient descent algorithm or by slightly extending the mathematics of the EM algorithm to this hard threshold case. We show that the K-Means algorithm actually minimizes the quantization error using the very fast Newton algorithm.
summary: Despite the popularity of building different embeddings, there is little work investigating the use of clustering to modify the embedding in an end-to-end deep learning framework. @cite_23 investigate a differentiable version of the kmeans algorithm and examine its convergence properties. Our work focuses on learnable feature representations (instead of fixed ones as in @cite_23 ) and introduces memory units for the task.