CAESAR: Clustering via Autonomous Embedding-Space Agglomerative Reorganization

Abstract

Clustering algorithms that operate on nearest-neighbor graphs, such as FINCH (First Integer Neighbor Clustering Hierarchy), depend heavily on the quality of the embedding space they are given. However, pretrained vision and language model embeddings are not optimized for this purpose. We propose CAESAR, a method that reorganizes a pretrained embedding space: a reorganization network is trained to pull mutual nearest neighbors together and push non-neighbors apart, yielding a reorganized embedding space substantially better suited to clustering. CAESAR offers a second major advantage: it never requires the number of clusters $K$. This matters because in realistic unsupervised settings, $K$ is typically unknown and discovering it is often part of the problem, yet most strong clustering methods take it as an input. We therefore design the entire CAESAR pipeline to infer $K$ rather than assume it is known. Empirically, reorganizing the embeddings consistently improves clustering over the raw space on both text and image datasets. Since the few deep clustering methods that also infer $K$ do not release their code, we complement controlled comparisons with methods that infer $K$ on the same embedding space by comparisons with strong deep clustering methods that are given the true $K$, giving them a substantial oracle advantage. Even so, CAESAR outperforms all of them on text, achieves the best results on the most challenging image benchmark and remains competitive on the others. Reorganizing pretrained embeddings thus emerges as a simple and powerful route to clustering realistic data, where classes overlap and the number of clusters is unknown.