CONAN: Contrastive Fusion Networks for Multi-view Clustering

Abstract

With the development of big data, deep learning has made remarkable progress on multi-view clustering. Multi-view fusion is a crucial technique for the model obtaining a common representation. However, existing literature adopts shallow fusion strategies, such as weighted-sum fusion and concatenating fusion, which fail to capture complex information from multiple views. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion technique, entitled contrastive fusion, which can extract consistent representations from multiple views and maintain the characteristic of view-specific representations. Specifically, we study multi-view alignment from an information bottleneck perspective and introduce an intermediate variable to align each view-specific representation. Furthermore, we leverage a single-view clustering method as a predictive task to ensure the contrastive fusion is working. We integrate all components into an unified framework called CONtrAstive fusion Network (CONAN). Experiment results on five multi-view datasets demonstrate that CONAN outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our source code will be available soon at https://github.com/guanzhou-ke/conan.