Partially multi-view clustering via re-alignment

Multi-view clustering learns consistent information from multi-view data, aiming to achieve more significant clustering characteristics. However, data in real-world scenarios often exhibit temporal or spatial asynchrony, leading to views with unaligned instances. Existing methods primarily address this issue by learning transformation matrices to align unaligned instances, but this process of learning differentiable transformation matrices is cumbersome. To address the challenge of partially unaligned instances, we propose Partially Multi-view Clustering via Re-alignment (PMVCR). Our approach integrates representation learning and data alignment through a two-stage training and a re-alignment process. Specifically, our training process consists of three stages: (i) In the coarse-grained alignment stage, we construct negative instance pairs for unaligned instances and utilize contrastive learning to preliminarily learn the view representations of the instances. (ii) In the re-alignment stage, we match unaligned instances based on the similarity of their view representations, aligning them with the primary view. (iii) In the fine-grained alignment stage, we further enhance the discriminative power of the view representations and the model’s ability to differentiate between clusters. Compared to existing models, our method effectively leverages information between unaligned samples and enhances model generalization by constructing negative instance pairs. Clustering experiments on several popular multi-view datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/WenB777/PMVCR.git.