MICCF: A Mutual Information Constrained Clustering Framework for Learning Clustering-Oriented Feature Representations

Deep clustering is a crucial task in machine learning and data mining that focuses on acquiring feature representations conducive to clustering. Previous research relies on self-supervised representation learning for general feature representations, such features may not be optimally suited for downstream clustering tasks. In this article, we introduce MICCF, a framework designed to bridge this gap and enhance clustering performance. MICCF enhances feature representations by combining mutual information constraints at different levels and employs an auxiliary alignment mutual information module for learning clustering-oriented features. To be specific, we propose a dual mutual information constraints module, incorporating minimal mutual information constraints at the feature level and maximal mutual information constraints at the instance level. This reduction in feature redundancy encourages the neural network to extract more discriminative features, while maximization ensures more unbiased and robust representations. To obtain clustering-oriented representations, the auxiliary alignment mutual information module utilizes pseudo-labels to maximize mutual information through a multi-classifier network, aligning features with the clustering task. The main network and the auxiliary module work in synergy to jointly optimize feature representations that are well-suited for the clustering task. We validate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets. The results indicate that our method performs well in most scenarios, particularly on fine-grained datasets, where our approach effectively distinguishes subtle differences between closely related categories. Notably, our approach achieved a remarkable accuracy of 96.4% on the ImageNet-10 dataset, surpassing other comparison methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Li-Hyn/MICCF.git.