Unsupervised Deep Learning via Affinity Diffusion

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in a variety of computer vision tasks. However, they usually rely on supervised model learning with the need for massive labelled training data, limiting dramatically their usability and deployability in real-world scenarios without any labelling budget. In this work, we introduce a general-purpose unsupervised deep learning approach to deriving discriminative feature representations. It is based on self-discovering semantically consistent groups of unlabelled training samples with the same class concepts through a progressive affinity diffusion process. Extensive experiments on object image classification and clustering show the performance superiority of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art unsupervised learning models using six common image recognition benchmarks including MNIST, SVHN, STL10, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet.