# Center-Oriented Prototype Contrastive Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15231/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Invariant Information Clustering for Unsupervised Image Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06653/) (2018)
- [SCAN: Learning to Classify Images without Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12320/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09687/) (2020)
- [Variational Deep Embedding: An Unsupervised and Generative Approach to Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05148/) (2016)
- [Joint Unsupervised Learning of Deep Representations and Image Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03628/) (2016)
- [SPICE: Semantic Pseudo-labeling for Image Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09382/) (2021)
- [Deep Comprehensive Correlation Mining for Image Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06925/) (2019)
- [ClusterGAN : Latent Space Clustering in Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.03627/) (2018)
- [Clustering-friendly Representation Learning via Instance Discrimination and Feature Decorrelation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00131/) (2021)
- [Graph Contrastive Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01429/) (2021)
- [Hard Sample Aware Network for Contrastive Deep Graph Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08665/) (2022)
- [Twin Contrastive Learning for Online Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11680/) (2022)
- [Learning Representation for Clustering via Prototype Scattering and Positive Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11821/) (2021)
- [Decoupled Contrastive Multi-View Clustering with High-Order Random Walks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11164/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive learning is widely used in clustering tasks due to its discriminative representation. However, the conflict problem between classes is difficult to solve effectively. Existing methods try to solve this problem through prototype contrast, but there is a deviation between the calculation of hard prototypes and the true cluster center. To address this problem, we propose a center-oriented prototype contrastive clustering framework, which consists of a soft prototype contrastive module and a dual consistency learning module. In short, the soft prototype contrastive module uses the probability that the sample belongs to the cluster center as a weight to calculate the prototype of each category, while avoiding inter-class conflicts and reducing prototype drift. The dual consistency learning module aligns different transformations of the same sample and the neighborhoods of different samples respectively, ensuring that the features have transformation-invariant semantic information and compact intra-cluster distribution, while providing reliable guarantees for the calculation of prototypes. Extensive experiments on five datasets show that the proposed method is effective compared to the SOTA. Our code is published on https://github.com/LouisDong95/CPCC.