# Dual Advancement of Representation Learning and Clustering for Sparse and Noisy Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01781 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01781/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [From Louvain to Leiden: guaranteeing well-connected communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08473/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09687/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Masked Autoencoders are Stronger Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13532/) (2022)
- [Auxiliary Tasks in Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06334/) (2018)
- [ConvMAE: Masked Convolution Meets Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.03892/) (2022)
- [Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04770/) (2021)
- [Are all negatives created equal in contrastive instance discrimination?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06682/) (2020)
- [Deep Multiview Clustering by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10769/) (2023)
- [Discriminatively Boosted Image Clustering with Fully Convolutional Auto-Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07980/) (2017)
- [Similarity Contrastive Estimation for Self-Supervised Soft Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14585/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning Optimal Multimodal Information Bottleneck Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19996/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Sparse and noisy images (SNIs), like those in spatial gene expression data, pose significant challenges for effective representation learning and clustering, which are essential for thorough data analysis and interpretation. In response to these challenges, we propose Dual Advancement of Representation Learning and Clustering (DARLC), an innovative framework that leverages contrastive learning to enhance the representations derived from masked image modeling. Simultaneously, DARLC integrates cluster assignments in a cohesive, end-to-end approach. This integrated clustering strategy addresses the "class collision problem" inherent in contrastive learning, thus improving the quality of the resulting representations. To generate more plausible positive views for contrastive learning, we employ a graph attention network-based technique that produces denoised images as augmented data. As such, our framework offers a comprehensive approach that improves the learning of representations by enhancing their local perceptibility, distinctiveness, and the understanding of relational semantics. Furthermore, we utilize a Student's t mixture model to achieve more robust and adaptable clustering of SNIs. Extensive experiments, conducted across 12 different types of datasets consisting of SNIs, demonstrate that DARLC surpasses the state-of-the-art methods in both image clustering and generating image representations that accurately capture gene interactions. Code is available at https://github.com/zipging/DARLC.