KNNDA: A New Perspective of Alignment Recovery for Partially View-Aligned Clustering

Abstract

In multi-view clustering (MVC), complementary and consistent information from multiple views is integrated to improve clustering performance. However, inter-view sample correspondences may be partially missing in practice, making it difficult to learn cross-view consistency, which leads to the partially view-aligned problem (PVP). Most existing partially view-aligned clustering (PVC) methods first learn cross-view consistent representations based on known alignments, and then recover missing correspondences by measuring cross-view similarity between samples. However, such an indirect alignment recovery process depends on high-quality consistent representations and lacks effective utilization of known alignments, often resulting in sub-optimal outcomes. To address this, we propose a novel direct alignment recovery perspective, instantiated as K-Nearest Neighbors Direct Alignment (KNNDA). Specifically, we first construct an alignment domain by mapping the aligned neighbors of each unaligned sample into the aligned view. Then, we compute alignment confidence based on the similarity between known aligned pairs of neighbors. In particular, we use a dynamic threshold to filter out unreliable alignments. Finally, new alignments are generated within the high-confidence alignment domain. Contrastive loss is used to learn consistent representations for clustering. Comprehensive experiments on several real-world datasets show the effectiveness and superiority of our module in partially view-aligned clustering.