# An Adaptor for Triggering Semi-Supervised Learning to Out-of-Box Serve Deep Image Clustering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20976 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20976/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06434/) (2015)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [DivideMix: Learning with Noisy Labels as Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.07394/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Towards K-means-friendly Spaces: Simultaneous Deep Learning and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04794/) (2016)
- [FreeMatch: Self-adaptive Thresholding for Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07246/) (2022)
- [Joint Unsupervised Learning of Deep Representations and Image Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03628/) (2016)
- [CoMatch: Semi-supervised Learning with Contrastive Graph Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11183/) (2020)
- [PiCIE: Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation using Invariance and Equivariance in Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17070/) (2021)
- [SPICE: Semantic Pseudo-labeling for Image Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09382/) (2021)
- [AdaMatch: A Unified Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning and Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04732/) (2021)
- [Deep Comprehensive Correlation Mining for Image Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06925/) (2019)
- [Deep Clustering: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04142/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Clustering: Taxonomy, Challenges, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07579/) (2022)
- [Cross-Domain Adaptive Clustering for Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09415/) (2021)
- [Class-Aware Contrastive Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02261/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recently, some works integrate SSL techniques into deep clustering frameworks to enhance image clustering performance. However, they all need pretraining, clustering learning, or a trained clustering model as prerequisites, limiting the flexible and out-of-box application of SSL learners in the image clustering task. This work introduces ASD, an adaptor that enables the cold-start of SSL learners for deep image clustering without any prerequisites. Specifically, we first randomly sample pseudo-labeled data from all unlabeled data, and set an instance-level classifier to learn them with semantically aligned instance-level labels. With the ability of instance-level classification, we track the class transitions of predictions on unlabeled data to extract high-level similarities of instance-level classes, which can be utilized to assign cluster-level labels to pseudo-labeled data. Finally, we use the pseudo-labeled data with assigned cluster-level labels to trigger a general SSL learner trained on the unlabeled data for image clustering. We show the superior performance of ASD across various benchmarks against the latest deep image clustering approaches and very slight accuracy gaps compared to SSL methods using ground-truth, e.g., only 1.33% on CIFAR-10. Moreover, ASD can also further boost the performance of existing SSL-embedded deep image clustering methods.