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arXiv · 2608.12027

Uncertainty-Aware Probabilistic Constrained Clustering from Entangled Pairwise Supervision

Shaojie Zhang·Ke Chen
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Abstract

Pairwise constrained clustering typically relies on hard must-link/cannot-link labels, whereas realistic pairwise supervision may be real-valued and entangle intrinsic ambiguity, expert judgment, and stochastic corruption. Existing deep constrained clustering (DCC) methods mainly target hard, expert-agnostic constraints, treating soft labels mostly numerically rather than semantically. We formalize this setting as uncertainty-aware probabilistic constrained clustering (UPCC), defining a canonical aleatoric target through a heterogeneous observation process and analyzing its conditional identifiability. We introduce ProbPair, an angular pairwise objective for probabilistic relations, and build ECI-PP, an estimator--corrector--integrator framework that refines imperfect supervision via belief estimation, correction, and reliability-aware integration. Across challenging probabilistic supervision settings, experiments on diverse benchmarks show that ECI-PP outperforms state-of-the-art DCC methods and remains robust with a shared default configuration.

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Shaojie Zhang, Ke Chen. 2026-08-12. Uncertainty-Aware Probabilistic Constrained Clustering from Entangled Pairwise Supervision. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12027

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