Deep Amortized Clustering

Abstract

We propose a deep amortized clustering (DAC), a neural architecture which learns to cluster datasets efficiently using a few forward passes. DAC implicitly learns what makes a cluster, how to group data points into clusters, and how to count the number of clusters in datasets. DAC is meta-learned using labelled datasets for training, a process distinct from traditional clustering algorithms which usually require hand-specified prior knowledge about cluster shapes/structures. We empirically show, on both synthetic and image data, that DAC can efficiently and accurately cluster new datasets coming from the same distribution used to generate training datasets.