# Unsupervised Learning using Pretrained CNN and Associative Memory Bank

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.01033 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01033/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

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- [Dynamic Feature Alignment for Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.09641/) (2021)
- [Graph Your Own Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23373/) (2025)
- [Pulmonary Disease Classification Using Globally Correlated Maximum Likelihood: an Auxiliary Attention mechanism for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00573/) (2021)
- [Prospector Heads: Generalized Feature Attribution for Large Models & Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11729/) (2024)
- [There Is a Digital Art History](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07464/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep Convolutional features extracted from a comprehensive labeled dataset, contain substantial representations which could be effectively used in a new domain. Despite the fact that generic features achieved good results in many visual tasks, fine-tuning is required for pretrained deep CNN models to be more effective and provide state-of-the-art performance. Fine tuning using the backpropagation algorithm in a supervised setting, is a time and resource consuming process. In this paper, we present a new architecture and an approach for unsupervised object recognition that addresses the above mentioned problem with fine tuning associated with pretrained CNN-based supervised deep learning approaches while allowing automated feature extraction. Unlike existing works, our approach is applicable to general object recognition tasks. It uses a pretrained (on a related domain) CNN model for automated feature extraction pipelined with a Hopfield network based associative memory bank for storing patterns for classification purposes. The use of associative memory bank in our framework allows eliminating backpropagation while providing competitive performance on an unseen dataset.
