Explicit View-labels Matter: A Multifacet Complementarity Study of Multi-view Clustering
This work addresses a key bottleneck in multi-view clustering for researchers and practitioners by enhancing complementarity learning, though it is incremental as it builds on existing contrastive learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of insufficient attention to complementarity in multi-view clustering by proposing a framework that learns complementarity from multiple facets, including feature-, view-label-, and contrast-facets, with explicit use of view-labels. It achieves average improvements of over 5.00% and 7.00% in complete and incomplete settings on Caltech101-20.
Consistency and complementarity are two key ingredients for boosting multi-view clustering (MVC). Recently with the introduction of popular contrastive learning, the consistency learning of views has been further enhanced in MVC, leading to promising performance. However, by contrast, the complementarity has not received sufficient attention except just in the feature facet, where the Hilbert Schmidt Independence Criterion term or the independent encoder-decoder network is usually adopted to capture view-specific information. This motivates us to reconsider the complementarity learning of views comprehensively from multiple facets including the feature-, view-label- and contrast- facets, while maintaining the view consistency. We empirically find that all the facets contribute to the complementarity learning, especially the view-label facet, which is usually neglected by existing methods. Based on this, a simple yet effective \underline{M}ultifacet \underline{C}omplementarity learning framework for \underline{M}ulti-\underline{V}iew \underline{C}lustering (MCMVC) is naturally developed, which fuses multifacet complementarity information, especially explicitly embedding the view-label information. To our best knowledge, it is the first time to use view-labels explicitly to guide the complementarity learning of views. Compared with the SOTA baselines, MCMVC achieves remarkable improvements, e.g., by average margins over $5.00\%$ and $7.00\%$ respectively in complete and incomplete MVC settings on Caltech101-20 in terms of three evaluation metrics.