# Expand-and-Quantize: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation Using High-Dimensional Space and Product Quantization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.07342 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07342/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [COCO-Stuff: Thing and Stuff Classes in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03716/) (2016)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [Deep Multi-modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.07830/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation by Distilling Feature Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08414/) (2022)
- [PiCIE: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation using Invariance and Equivariance in Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17070/) (2021)
- [Training with Quantization Noise for Extreme Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07320/) (2020)
- [Deep Semantic Segmentation of Natural and Medical Images: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07655/) (2019)
- [The Information Bottleneck Problem and Its Applications in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14941/) (2020)
- [Autoregressive Unsupervised Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08247/) (2020)
- [Learning visual groups from co-occurrences in space and time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06811/) (2015)
- [ACSeg: Adaptive Conceptualization for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05944/) (2022)
- [TransFGU: A Top-down Approach to Fine-Grained Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01515/) (2021)
- [Self-supervised Product Quantization for Deep Unsupervised Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02244/) (2021)
- [A Vector Quantized Approach for Text to Speech Synthesis on Real-World Spontaneous Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04215/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Supervised Product Quantization for Image Search and Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08589/) (2017)
- [Towards holistic scene understanding: Semantic segmentation and beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07734/) (2022)
- [Towards High-Quality Neural TTS for Low-Resource Languages by Learning Compact Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15131/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Progressive Proxy Anchor Propagation for Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12463/) (2024)
- [Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15590/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Monocular Road Segmentation for Autonomous Driving via Scene Geometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16790/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Unsupervised semantic segmentation (USS) aims to discover and recognize meaningful categories without any labels. For a successful USS, two key abilities are required: 1) information compression and 2) clustering capability. Previous methods have relied on feature dimension reduction for information compression, however, this approach may hinder the process of clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel USS framework called Expand-and-Quantize Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation (EQUSS), which combines the benefits of high-dimensional spaces for better clustering and product quantization for effective information compression. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that EQUSS achieves state-of-the-art results on three standard benchmarks. In addition, we analyze the entropy of USS features, which is the first step towards understanding USS from the perspective of information theory.