Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 (NeurIPS 2019)
Yangbangyan Jiang, Qianqian Xu, Zhiyong Yang, Xiaochun Cao, Qingming Huang
Data exhibited with multiple modalities are ubiquitous in real-world clustering tasks. Most existing methods, however, pose a strong assumption that the pairing information for modalities is available for all instances. In this paper, we consider a more challenging task where each instance is represented in only one modality, which we call mixed-modal data. Without any extra pairing supervision across modalities, it is difficult to find a universal semantic space for all of them. To tackle this problem, we present an adversarial learning framework for clustering with mixed-modal data. Instead of transforming all the samples into a joint modality-independent space, our framework learns the mappings across individual modal spaces by virtue of cycle-consistency. Through these mappings, we could easily unify all the samples into a single modal space and perform the clustering. Evaluations on several real-world mixed-modal datasets could demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework.