Research map / Learning theory and algorithms / Clustering
k-means++ seeding analysis
Analyze and speed up k-means++ seeding and Lloyd-type algorithms.
76 accepted papers at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI (2016–2026) · an approach in Clustering, keyword cluster “center · median · coreset”
State History Tried Checklist Preprints Who Export
Where it stands
Not enough benchmark data Fewer than four papers report the same benchmark, so there is no record to follow.
14 papers in 2023–24 and 11 in 2025–26 (at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI); its share of the topic shrank, from 10.0% to 5.3%.
How this is decided
A benchmark is tracked when at least four papers of this approach report their own method on the same dataset and metric in at least two different years. Its record is the best number reported up to 2024 compared with the best reported in 2025–26: still improving means at least 1% better, flat means at most 0.2% better with at least two papers from 2025–26 trying. Numbers on a different scale from the rest (a fraction among percentages) and far outliers are left out. Results come from different papers with different setups, so they are signals, not head-to-head comparisons. The share of papers is counted at ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR and AAAI.
How it got here
Most cited paper of each year
- 2016 · Approximate K-Means++ in Sublinear Time (AAAI 2016 · 118 citations)
- 2017 · Approximation Bounds for Hierarchical Clustering: Average Linkage, Bisecting K-means, and Local Search (NeurIPS 2017 · 78 citations)
- 2018 · Differential Performance Debugging With Discriminant Regression Trees (AAAI 2018 · 15 citations)
- 2019 · q-means: A quantum algorithm for unsupervised machine learning (NeurIPS 2019 · 108 citations)
- 2020 · Explainable k-Means and k-Medians Clustering (ICML 2020 · 20 citations)
- 2021 · Near-Optimal Algorithms for Explainable k-Medians and k-Means (ICML 2021 · 12 citations)
- 2022 · How to Find a Good Explanation for Clustering? (AAAI 2022 · 26 citations)
- 2023 · Improved Learning-augmented Algorithms for k-means and k-medians Clustering (ICLR 2023 · 3 citations)
- 2024 · Big Learning Expectation Maximization (AAAI 2024 · 5 citations)
- 2025 · Modified K-means Algorithm with Local Optimality Guarantees (ICML 2025 · 0 citations)
- 2026 · The Catastrophic Failure of *the* k-Means Algorithm in High Dimensions, and How Hartigan's Algorithm Avoids It (ICML 2026 · 0 citations)
Earliest papers here
- Approximate K-Means++ in Sublinear Time (AAAI 2016 · 118 citations)
- Fast k-means with accurate bounds (ICML 2016 · 41 citations)
- Speeding up k-means by approximating Euclidean distances via block vectors (ICML 2016 · 31 citations)
What has been tried
65 papers here report 401 measured changes (a component added, removed or swapped, compared with a baseline): helped 66%, no clear effect 10%, hurt 15%, mixed 8%. Papers mostly publish changes that helped, so "helped" is over-represented.
Ablations in recent papers
| What was changed | Measured on | Result | Effect | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Add MAP estimate for mixture weights | 25-GMM simulated datasets · Test Joint KL Divergence | 0.263 -> 0.225 | Helped | Big Learning Expectation Maximization (AAAI 2024 · 5 citations) |
| Use Sentence-T5 rather than BERT embeddings for sampling | WMT T2T EnDe · accuracy | No clear effect | Data-Efficient Learning via Clustering-Based Sensitivity Sampling: Foundation Models and Beyond (ICML 2024 · 1 citation) | |
| Use minimum-loss D-local move instead of the first improving D-local move | News20, K=10 · computation time | 6.18 -> 2.55 | Helped | Modified K-means Algorithm with Local Optimality Guarantees (ICML 2025 · 0 citations) |
What reviewers will expect
Datasets and baselines named in the 7 papers of this approach from 2025–2026 that have a full-text summary. Leaving out the common ones is a frequent review question.
Datasets
- Iris · 2 of 7 papers
Baselines
- k-means++ · 3 of 7 papers
Recent preprints
Loading recent arXiv preprints…
Who publishes on it
Institutions on the most papers of this approach since 2023 (of 25 papers; from OpenAlex and the papers' affiliations).
- Carnegie Mellon University · 4 papers
- Google · 3 papers
- University at Buffalo · 2 papers
- Pennsylvania State University · 2 papers
- Central South University · 2 papers
Use it
Download BibTeX of 37 key papersOpen the topic in the interactive map
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Related approaches
Same keyword cluster
- Coresets and dynamic clustering (77 papers)
- Fair clustering approximation (31 papers)
Elsewhere in the topic
- Clustering approximation algorithms (150 papers)
- Incomplete multi-view clustering (125 papers)
- Correlation clustering (102 papers)
- Subspace clustering (102 papers)
- Spectral clustering algorithms (43 papers)
- Fairness-constrained clustering (19 papers)
Benchmark numbers, ablations and baseline numbers are extracted by AI from each paper's full text and can be wrong; the paper is the authority. Data: results index of 2026-11-02, citation counts from OpenAlex (2026-10-09).