Spatial Structure and Selective Text Jointly Facilitate Image Clustering

Image clustering is a fundamental task in visual machine learning. A key research direction in this field is the incorporation of prior knowledge. Recently, such prior knowledge has evolved from internal compactness constraints to external textual guidance. In particular, the introduction of textual modalities through CLIP has demonstrated impressive performance. However, CLIP is designed primarily for image–text alignment and may not be sufficient to capture clustering structures. Moreover, existing approaches often assume that textual features are universally beneficial, overlooking their varying suitability for different datasets. To address these issues, we propose to use spatial structure and selective text to jointly facilitate image clustering (SATC). Specifically, we design a graph attention network (GAT)-based encoder to capture relational dependencies among image patches, thereby extracting spatial features to facilitate clustering. In addition, we introduce a textual feature selector that uses the potential clustering compactness of textual features as the selection criterion and adaptively integrates them into the clustering process. Theoretical guidance is provided for this selector. Finally, the cluster assignment is produced through Tri-modal mutual distillation. Extensive experiments on 18 benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SATC. The experimental results further verify the rationality of the textual feature selector. The code will be published.