Contrastive Graph Distribution Alignment for Partially View-Aligned Clustering

Xibiao Wang, Hang Gao, Xindian Wei, Liang Peng, Rui Li, Cheng Liu, Si Wu, Hau-San Wong

Abstract: Partially View-aligned Clustering (PVC) presents a challenge as it requires a comprehensive exploration of complementary and consistent information in the presence of partial alignment of view data. Existing PVC methods typically learn view correspondence based on latent features that are expected to contain common semantic information. However, latent features obtained from heterogeneous spaces, along with the enforcement of alignment into the same feature dimension, can introduce cross-view discrepancies. In particular, partially view-aligned data lacks sufficient shared correspondences for the critical common semantic feature learning, resulting in inaccuracies in establishing meaningful correspondences between latent features across different views. While feature representations may differ across views, instance relationships within each view could potentially encode consistent common semantics across views. Motivated by this, our aim is to learn view correspondence based on graph distribution metrics that capture semantic view-invariant instance relationships. To achieve this, we utilize similarity graphs to depict instance relationships and learn view correspondence by aligning semantic similarity graphs through optimal transport with graph distribution. This facilitates the precise learning of view alignments, even in the presence of heterogeneous view-specific feature distortions. Furthermore, leveraging well-established cross-view correspondence, we introduce a cross-view contrastive learning to learn semantic features by exploiting consistency information. The resulting meaningful semantic features effectively isolate shared latent patterns, avoiding the inclusion of irrelevant private information. We conduct extensive experiments on several real datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed method for the PVC task.