UDCH: Unsupervised Dynamic Weighted Cluster-cooperative Hashing for Cross-modal Retreival

In cross-modal retrieval tasks, unsupervised hash code learning still faces key challenges, including the difficulty of modeling shared semantic structures across modalities and the inability to adaptively balance multiple supervision objectives during optimization. To address these issues, we propose a novel Unsupervised Dynamic Weighted Cluster-Cooperative Hashing (UDCH) framework, which jointly models featurelevel alignment and cluster-level semantic structure to guide consistency learning across modalities under label-free conditions. Specifically, we design an instance-level contrastive loss in the feature branch to align the embedding spaces of images and texts, while employing K-Means clustering to generate pseudo-labels and construct a cluster-center contrast mechanism that captures semantic grouping information. Furthermore, we integrate cross-modal feature similarity to construct a high-order structure matrix, enabling fine-grained structural supervision. To enhance the synergy of multiobjective optimization, we introduce a dynamic weighting strategy that adaptively adjusts the contributions of the feature and cluster branches based on the degree of modal alignment and semantic compactness. Extensive experiments on multiple cross-modal retrieval benchmarks demonstrate that UDCH achieves superior semantic alignment and retrieval performance under unsupervised settings, validating the effectiveness of multi-level semantic modeling and adaptive collaboration mechanisms in unsupervised hashing tasks.