arXiv:2607.06887cs.LG2026-07

用进化策略最大化惊喜度,实现无需梯度的自监督图像聚类。

Converge to Surprise: Evolutionary Self-supervised Image Clustering

论文配图:Converge to Surprise: Evolutionary Self-supervised Image Clustering
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 用进化策略直接优化惊喜得分,不依赖梯度。
  • 在标准基准上达到非参数自监督聚类新最佳性能。
  • 适合追求无监督聚类新范式的研究人员。

大多数自监督图像聚类模型基于梯度下降:每个优化步骤都需要明确的目标,如对比样本、掩码块、教师输出或伪标签。本文提出一种无需此类目标的新框架。假设每个像素独立同分布于最大熵原则(零假设H0),定义“惊喜分数”衡量模型输出在H0下发生的可能性。最大化惊喜分数迫使模型拒绝随机性,发现数据中的非随机特征。由于惊喜分数通常无法化为每步损失,我们设计“收敛到惊喜”机制:外层进化策略(ES)直接最大化惊喜分数(无需梯度),内层周期性梯度下降利用ES发现的聚类作为代理目标。在标准图像基准上,该框架在非参数自监督聚类(即不预先告知真实类别数)任务中取得新最佳结果。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Most self-supervised image clustering models, actually almost all deep learning approaches, are based on gradient descent: In order to calculate the loss, every optimization step requires a clearly defined target, whether a contrastive split, a masked patch or entity, an EMA-teacher output, a pseudo-label, or a differentiable information-theoretic functional. We propose a self-supervised framework that drops this requirement for image clustering. Without any prior knowledge, we have to assume that each pixel is i.i.d. according to the Principle of Maximum Entropy. Taking this as our null hypothesis H0, we define a "surprise score" that measures how unlikely the model's output representation would be under H0. Maximizing the surprise score forces the deep learning model to reject H0 - equivalently, to discover non-random feature from data. Also, here is our fundamental assumption: a surprise score cannot, in general, be reduced to a per-step loss. Hence, we propose the "converge-to-surprise" scheme to optimize our model: an evolution-strategy (ES) outer loop, which directly maximizes the surprise score without needing its gradient, paired with a periodic gradient-descent inner loop, which uses the surprising clusters already discovered by ES as surrogate targets. On standard image benchmarks, our framework achieves new state-of-the-art results in non-parametric self-supervised image clustering - the strictest deep-clustering setting, in which the number of ground-truth classes is not given to the model.

自监督学习图像聚类进化策略无监督方法

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