Title: Metric $k$-clustering using only Weak Comparison Oracles
Primary area: learning theory
Keywords: clustering, $k$-center, $k$-median, $k$-means, comparison oracles, learned rankers, learning-augmented algorithms

Abstract: Clustering is a fundamental primitive in unsupervised learning. However, classical algorithms for $k$-clustering (such as $k$-median and $k$-means) assume access to exact pairwise distances---an unrealistic requirement in many modern applications.  We study clustering in the \emph{Rank-model (R-model)}, where access to distances is entirely replaced by a  \emph{quadruplet oracle} that provides only relative distance comparisons. In practice, such an oracle can represent learned models or human feedback, and is expected to be noisy and entail an access cost.

Given a metric space with $n$ input items, we design randomized algorithms that, using only a noisy quadruplet oracle, compute a set of $O(k \cdot \mathsf{polylog}(n))$ centers along with a mapping from the input items to the centers such that the clustering cost of the mapping is at most constant times the optimum $k$-clustering cost. Our method achieves a query complexity of $O(n\cdot k \cdot \mathsf{polylog}(n))$ for arbitrary metric spaces and improves to $O((n+k^2) \cdot \mathsf{polylog}(n))$ when the underlying metric has bounded doubling dimension. When the metric has bounded doubling dimension we can further improve the approximation from constant to $\varepsilon$, for any arbitrarily small constant $\varepsilon\in(0,1)$, while preserving the same asymptotic query complexity.
Our framework demonstrates how noisy, low-cost oracles, such as those derived from large language models, can be systematically integrated into scalable clustering algorithms.