# Transferable Deep Metric Learning for Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06523 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06523/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Variational Graph Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07308/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Learning to Discover Novel Visual Categories via Deep Transfer Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09884/) (2019)
- [Asymmetric Tri-training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08400/) (2017)
- [Learning to cluster in order to transfer across domains and tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10125/) (2017)
- [AutoNovel: Automatically Discovering and Learning Novel Visual Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15252/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Clustering in high dimension spaces is a difficult task; the usual distance metrics may no longer be appropriate under the curse of dimensionality. Indeed, the choice of the metric is crucial, and it is highly dependent on the dataset characteristics. However a single metric could be used to correctly perform clustering on multiple datasets of different domains. We propose to do so, providing a framework for learning a transferable metric. We show that we can learn a metric on a labelled dataset, then apply it to cluster a different dataset, using an embedding space that characterises a desired clustering in the generic sense. We learn and test such metrics on several datasets of variable complexity (synthetic, MNIST, SVHN, omniglot) and achieve results competitive with the state-of-the-art while using only a small number of labelled training datasets and shallow networks.