Mixture of Experts as Representation Learner for Deep Multi-View Clustering

Abstract

Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims to integrate information from diverse data sources to facilitate the clustering process, which has achieved considerable success in various real-world applications. However, previous MVC methods typically employ one of two strategies: (1) designing separate feature extraction pipelines for each view, which restricts their ability to fully exploit collaborative potential; or (2) employing a single shared representation module, which hinders the capture of diverse, view-specific representations. To tackle these challenges, we introduce Deep Multi-View Clustering via Collaborative Experts (DMVC-CE), a novel MVC approach that employs the Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework. DMVC-CE incorporates a gating network that dynamically selects multiple experts for handling each data sample, capturing diverse and complementary information from different views. Additionally, to ensure balanced expert utilization and maintain their diversity, we introduce an equilibrium loss and a multi-expert distinctiveness enhancer. The equilibrium loss prevents excessive reliance on specific experts, while the distinctiveness enhancer encourages each expert to specialize in different aspects of the data, thereby promoting diversity in learned representations. Comprehensive experiments on various multi-view benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of DMVC-CE compared to state-of-the-art MVC baselines.