What and How: Generalized Lifelong Spectral Clustering via Dual Memory

Spectral clustering has become one of the most effective clustering algorithms. We in this work explore the problem of spectral clustering in a lifelong learning framework termed as Generalized Lifelong Spectral Clustering (GL ²SC). Different from most current studies, which concentrate on a fixed spectral clustering task set and cannot efficiently incorporate a new clustering task, the goal of our work is to establish a generalized model for new spectral clustering task by What and How to lifelong learn from past tasks. For what to lifelong learn, our GL ²SC framework contains a dual memory mechanism with a deep orthogonal factorization manner: an orthogonal basis memory stores hidden and hierarchical clustering centers among learned tasks, and a feature embedding memory captures deep manifold representation common across multiple related tasks. When a new clustering task arrives, the intuition here for how to lifelong learn is that GL ²SC can transfer intrinsic knowledge from dual memory mechanism to obtain task-specific encoding matrix. Then the encoding matrix can redefine the dual memory over time to provide maximal benefits when learning future tasks. To the end, empirical comparisons on several benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our GL ²SC, in comparison with several state-of-the-art spectral clustering models.