Cluster Specific Representation Learning

Representation learning aims to extract meaningful lower-dimensional embeddings from data, known as representations. Despite its widespread application, there is no established definition of a ``good'' representation. Typically, the representation quality is evaluated based on its performance in downstream tasks such as clustering, de-noising, etc. However, this task-specific approach has a limitation where a representation that performs well for one task may not necessarily be effective for another. This highlights the need for a more agnostic formulation, which is the focus of our work. We propose a downstream-agnostic formulation: when inherent clusters exist in the data, the representations should be specific to each cluster. Under this idea, we develop a meta-algorithm that jointly learns cluster-specific representations and cluster assignments. As our approach is easy to integrate with any representation learning framework, we demonstrate its effectiveness in various setups, including Autoencoders, Variational Autoencoders, Contrastive learning models, and Restricted Boltzmann Machines. We qualitatively compare our cluster-specific embeddings to standard embeddings and downstream tasks such as de-noising and clustering. While our method slightly increases runtime and parameters compared to the standard model, the experiments clearly show that it extracts the inherent cluster structures in the data, resulting in improved performance in relevant applications.