arXiv:2607.06887v2 Announce Type: replace

Abstract: A variety of self-supervised image clustering approaches are invented in the past years. However, all dominant approaches are exploitative: The direction of parameter updates is determined by known states (observed input samples and existing parameters). We propose an explorative self-supervised learning framework that steps out of this zone. We define a surprise score that measures how unlikely the model's output representation is, assuming that all pixels are i.i.d. random noise. Maximizing the surprise score forces the deep learning model to reject the random noise null hypothesis, or equivalently, to discover non-randomness from data. Also, we propose a fundamental assumption: a surprise score cannot, in general, be fully optimized by exploitative optimization approaches. Thus, we propose the converge-to-surprise scheme to optimize a model: an evolution-strategy (ES) outer loop, which maximizes the surprise score using the mutation-selection mechanism, paired with a periodic gradient-descent inner loop, which uses the surprising clusters already discovered by ES as surrogate targets. On simple image benchmarks, our framework trained from scratch achieves new state-of-the-art results in non-parametric self-supervised image clustering --- the strictest deep-clustering setting, where the number of classes is unknown during training.