Unsupervised discriminative feature learning via finding a clustering-friendly embedding space

In this paper, we propose an enhanced deep clustering network (EDCN), which is composed of a Feature Extractor, a Conditional Generator, a Discriminator and a Siamese Network. Specifically, we will utilize two kinds of generated data based on adversarial training, as well as the original data, to train the Fea-ture Extractor for learning effective latent representations. In addition, we adopt the Siamese network to find an embedding space, where a better affinity similarity matrix is obtained as the key to success of spectral clustering in providing reliable pseudo-labels. Particularly, the obtained pseudo-labels will be used to generate realistic data by the Generator. Finally, the discriminator is used to model the real joint distribution of data and corresponding latent representations for Feature Extractor enhancement. To eval-uate our proposed EDCN, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple data sets including MNIST, USPS, FRGC, CIFAR-10, STL-10, and Fashion-MNIST by comparing our method with a number of state-of-the-art deep clustering methods, and experimental results demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.