You Can Trust Your Clustering Model: A Parameter-free Self-Boosting Plug-in for Deep Clustering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Hanyang, Jia, Yuheng, Liu, Hui, Hou, Junhui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Hanyang
Jia, Yuheng
Liu, Hui
Hou, Junhui
author_facet Li, Hanyang
Jia, Yuheng
Liu, Hui
Hou, Junhui
contents Recent deep clustering models have produced impressive clustering performance. However, a common issue with existing methods is the disparity between global and local feature structures. While local structures typically show strong consistency and compactness within class samples, global features often present intertwined boundaries and poorly separated clusters. Motivated by this observation, we propose DCBoost, a parameter-free plug-in designed to enhance the global feature structures of current deep clustering models. By harnessing reliable local structural cues, our method aims to elevate clustering performance effectively. Specifically, we first identify high-confidence samples through adaptive $k$-nearest neighbors-based consistency filtering, aiming to select a sufficient number of samples with high label reliability to serve as trustworthy anchors for self-supervision. Subsequently, these samples are utilized to compute a discriminative loss, which promotes both intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, to guide network optimization. Extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets showcase that our DCBoost significantly improves the clustering performance of diverse existing deep clustering models. Notably, our method improves the performance of current state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., ProPos) by more than 3% and amplifies the silhouette coefficient by over $7\times$. Code is available at <https://github.com/l-h-y168/DCBoost>.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21193
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle You Can Trust Your Clustering Model: A Parameter-free Self-Boosting Plug-in for Deep Clustering
Li, Hanyang
Jia, Yuheng
Liu, Hui
Hou, Junhui
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Recent deep clustering models have produced impressive clustering performance. However, a common issue with existing methods is the disparity between global and local feature structures. While local structures typically show strong consistency and compactness within class samples, global features often present intertwined boundaries and poorly separated clusters. Motivated by this observation, we propose DCBoost, a parameter-free plug-in designed to enhance the global feature structures of current deep clustering models. By harnessing reliable local structural cues, our method aims to elevate clustering performance effectively. Specifically, we first identify high-confidence samples through adaptive $k$-nearest neighbors-based consistency filtering, aiming to select a sufficient number of samples with high label reliability to serve as trustworthy anchors for self-supervision. Subsequently, these samples are utilized to compute a discriminative loss, which promotes both intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, to guide network optimization. Extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets showcase that our DCBoost significantly improves the clustering performance of diverse existing deep clustering models. Notably, our method improves the performance of current state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., ProPos) by more than 3% and amplifies the silhouette coefficient by over $7\times$. Code is available at <https://github.com/l-h-y168/DCBoost>.
title You Can Trust Your Clustering Model: A Parameter-free Self-Boosting Plug-in for Deep Clustering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21193