Abstract Prototype selection is a promising technique for removing redundancy and irrelevance from largescale data. Here, we consider it as a task assignment problem, which refers to assigning each element of a source set to one representative, i.e., prototype. However, due to the outliers and uncertain distribution on source, the selected prototypes are generally less representative and interesting. To alleviate this issue, we develop in this paper a Self-supervised Deep Low-rank Assignment model (SDLA). By dynamically integrating a low-rank assignment model with deep representation learning, our model effectively ensures the goodnessof-exemplar and goodness-of-discrimination of selected prototypes. Specifically, on the basis of a denoising autoencoder, dissimilarity metrics on source are continuously self-refined in embedding space with weak supervision from selected prototypes, thus preserving categorical similarity. Conversely, working on this metric space, similar samples tend to select the same prototypes by designing a low-rank assignment model. Experimental results on applications like text clustering and image classification (using prototypes) demonstrate our method is considerably superior to the state-ofthe-art methods in prototype selection.