Algorithmically Aligned Neural Agglomerative Tree Construction

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.07271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linkage algorithms for hierarchical clustering (HC) are a powerful and efficient framework for constructing clustering trees, yet it is often unclear which merge rule best suits a given dataset or task. In contrast, neural approaches can learn from data, but often fail to retain the efficiency and size generalization of classical algorithms. We introduce NN-linkage, a neural network (NN) model that can learn task-specific and locally dependent merg