This paper presents SPICE, a Semantic Pseudo-labeling framework for Image ClustEring. Instead of using indirect loss functions required by the recently proposed methods, SPICE generates pseudo-labels via self-learning and directly uses the pseudo-label-based classification loss to train a deep clustering network. The basic idea of SPICE is to synergize the discrepancy among semantic clusters, the similarity among instance samples, and the semantic consistency of local samples in an embedding space to optimize the clustering network in a semantically-driven paradigm. Specifically, a semantic-similarity-based pseudo-labeling algorithm is first proposed to train a clustering network through unsupervised representation learning. Given the initial clustering results, a local semantic consistency principle is used to select a set of reliably labeled samples, and a semi-pseudo-labeling algorithm is adapted for performance boosting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SPICE clearly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on six common benchmark datasets including STL10, Cifar10, Cifar100-20, ImageNet-10, ImageNet-Dog, and Tiny-ImageNet. On average, our SPICE method improves the current best results by about 10% in terms of adjusted rand index, normalized mutual information, and clustering accuracy.
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