AC-VAE: Learning Semantic Representation with VAE for Adaptive Clustering

Unsupervised representation learning is essential in the field of machine learning, and accurate neighbor clusters of representation show great potential to support unsupervised image classification. This paper proposes a VAE (Variational Autoencoder) based network and a clustering method to achieve adaptive neighbor clustering to support the self-supervised classification. The proposed network encodes the image into the representation with boundary information, and the proposed cluster method takes advantage of the boundary information to deliver adaptive neighbor cluster results. Experimental evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art representation learning methods in terms of neighbor clustering accuracy. Particularly, AC-VAE achieves 95\% and 82\% accuracy on CIFAR10 dataset when the average neighbor cluster sizes are 10 and 100. Furthermore, the neighbor cluster results are found converge within the clustering range ($\alpha\leq2$), and the converged neighbor clusters are used to support the self-supervised classification. The proposed method delivers classification results that are competitive with the state-of-the-art and reduces the super parameter $k$ in KNN (K-nearest neighbor), which is often used in self-supervised classification.