Multi-view clustering aims to leverage complementary information from multiple data sources to improve clustering quality. Traditional graph-based Non-k multi-view clustering methods enable automatic cluster number determination but suffer from severe scalability issues due to their reliance on constructing large sample-level affinity graphs with quadratic complexity. To address this limitation, we propose a novel scalable Non-k Multi-View Clustering framework via Inter-Anchor Graph learning (MVC-IAG). Our method first extracts a small set of representative anchors via k-means on concatenated multi-view features, then learns a unified inter-anchor graph by integrating multi-view structural information and feature similarity priors. Our framework performs Non-k cluster discovery directly on this compact, learned inter-anchor graph, thereby enabling automatic cluster number determination, and subsequently propagates the results to all samples. Extensive experiments on multiple large scale datasets demonstrate that MVC-IAG significantly reduces computational cost while achieving competitive or superior clustering performance compared to state-of-the-art Non-k multi view clustering approaches.

Anchor graph learning has become a widely used technique for significantly reducing the computational complexity in existing multi-view clustering methods. However, most existing approaches select anchors independently for each view and then generate the consensus graph by directly fusing all anchor graphs. This process overlooks the correspondence between anchor sets across different views, i.e., the column order correspondence of the anchor graphs. To address this limitation, we propose a novel anchor-based tensor multi-rank constraint multi-view clustering method (TMC). Specifically, TMC captures the high-order structural information of the original data by constructing an anchor graph tensor and enforcing a multi-rank constraint to induce a block-diagonal structure. Additionally, to enhance anchor consistency across all view, we construct the anchor graph of each view into an anchor tensor and impose a low-rank constraint on it. In this way, the block-diagonal structure of each anchor graph maintains an approximate alignment between anchors. Furthermore, we provide theoretical proof that the generated anchor graphs inherently exhibit a block-diagonal structure. Extensive experimental results on six multi-view datasets demonstrate that TMC outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness in multi-view clustering task.

Multi-view clustering (MVC) has demonstrated impressive performance due to its ability to capture both consistency and diversity information among views. However, most existing techniques assume that all views are available in advance, making them inadequate for stream-view data, such as in intelligent transportation systems and medical imaging analysis, where memory constraints or privacy concerns prevent storing all previous views. Although some methods attempt to address this issue by capturing consistency information, they often fail to effectively extract diversity information and cross-view relationships. We argue that these limitations are inherent to incremental multi-view clustering (IMVC), as the inability to retain all previous views inevitably leads to insufficient information utilization, thereby compromising performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel algorithm, termed Incremental Multi-View Clustering with Cross-View Correlation and Diversity (CDIMVC). Unlike existing methods that only retain consistency information, CDIMVC also preserves diversity information and utilizes similarity matrices to capture cross-view relationships. To implement this method, we develop three key modules: the dynamic view correlation analysis module (DVCAM), the knowledge extraction module (KEM), and the knowledge transfer module (KTM). When a new data view arrives, DVCAM first assesses its importance and correlation with historical views. Subsequently, KEM computes its consistency and diversity information by comparing it to those in the knowledge base. Finally, KTM facilitates the effective transmission of past knowledge, preventing the loss of historical information. By integrating these modules, CDIMVC can effectively capture cross-view relationships and diversity information, facilitating efficient knowledge updating and maintenance. An alternating procedure is also designed to optimize the resulting optimization problem. Experimental results show that CDIMVC exceeds state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling stream-view data.

Graph-based multi-view clustering methods have demonstrated satisfying performance by effectively capturing relationships among data samples. However, most existing methods primarily emphasize direct pairwise relationships, neglecting the exploration of high-order correlations present within each view. To this end, a novel approach, called multiview clustering via high-order bipartite graph learning and tensor low-rank representation (HBGTLRR), is proposed. Specifically, we first construct high-order bipartite graphs to capture latent relationships and concatenate them into a tensor. By applying tensor nuclear norm (TNN) minimization, we obtain a low-rank representation that reduces noise and preserves high-order consistency. Subsequently, a consensus graph is constructed by adaptively fusing the high-order bipartite graphs with corresponding weights, and then a Laplacian low-rank constraint is imposed on it to effectively capture the intrinsic data structure. Finally, extensive experimental results show that HBGTLRR significantly outperforms existing methods, thereby validating the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) on attributed networks aims to capture abnormal nodes whose attributes or structures differ significantly from most nodes. The existing GAD models amplify the representation differences between normal and abnormal nodes to identify anomalies via carefully designed feature extraction modules. However, these models ignore the bottlenecks encountered by abnormal nodes in message passing. In particular, when the anomalies occurs at critical crossroads, the information of multiple nodes is compressed into a fixed-length representation, and the resulting over-squashing weakens the abnormal information. To address this, we propose an unsupervisedSTructural optimization model guided by sIMilarity reconstruction (STIM). Specifically, we define redundant edges that cause over-squashing, design the Neighbor-Structure Optimization module to filter redundant edges through the edge-dropping strategy based on critical crossroads, and optimize the graph structure to alleviate over-squashing. In addition, to alleviate the over-smoothing caused by the high inter-class node similarity of the data itself and the edge-dropping strategy, we design the Neighbor-Similarity Reconstruction module based on similarity calculation, which guides the model to expand inter-class variation. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that STIM can effectively optimize message passing and improve anomaly detection performance. The source code is available athttps://github.com/Junyi-Yan/STIM.

Textual adversarial attacks expose the vulnerabilities of text classifiers and can be used to improve their robustness. Previous context-aware attack models suffer from several limitations. They generally rely on out-of-date substitutes, solely consider the gold label probability, and use the greedy search when generating adversarial examples, often limiting the attack efficiency. To tackle these issues, we proposeMC-PDBS, aMoreContext-aware textual adversarial attack model usingProbabilityDifference-guidedBeamSearch. MC-PDBS generates substitutes using the newest perturbed text sequences in each attack iteration, enabling the generation of more context-aware adversarial examples. The probability difference is an overall consideration of the probabilities of all class labels, which is more effective than the gold label probability in guiding the selection of attack paths. In addition, the beam search enables MC-PDBS to search attack paths from multiple search channels, thereby avoiding the limited search space problem. Extensive experiments and human evaluation demonstrate that MC-PDBS outperforms previous best models in a series of evaluation metrics, particularly bringing up to a +19.5% attack success rate. Extensive analyses further confirm the effectiveness of MC-PDBS.

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) optimally combines a group of predefined kernel matrices to improve clustering performance. Although demonstrating promising performance in various applications, most of existing approaches adopt the min–min formulation, which could be sensitive to perturbation with adversarial samples. Moreover, existing MKC algorithms often involve several hypermeters preventing them into further real applications. To address these issues, we propose a parameter-free effective sparse simple multiple kernel k-means algorithm with max–min optimization formulation in this paper. To be specific, we propose to optimize the widely used unsupervised kernel alignment criterion by minimizing the kernel coefficient and maximizing the clustering partition matrix. Unlike traditional min–min formulation, the max–min kernel alignment is robust to adversarial sample perturbation and free of hyper-parameters. An optimization method based on semi-infinite linear program is designed to solve the complicated optimization problem. Extensive experiments on six multiple kernel benchmark data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Adversarial attacks expose the vulnerability of deep neural networks. Compared to image adversarial attacks, textual adversarial attacks are more challenging due to the discrete nature of texts. Recent synonym-based methods achieve the current state-of-the-art results. However, these methods introduce new words against the original text, leading to that humans easily perceive the difference between the adversarial example and the original text. Motivated by the fact that humans are usually unaware of chaotic word order in some cases, we propose exchange-attack (EA), a concise and effective word-level textual adversarial attack model. Specifically, the EA model generates adversarial examples by exchanging words of the original text itself according to the contributions that these words make regarding classification results. Intuitively, the smaller the distance between the two exchanged words, the more difficult the chaotic word order to be perceived by humans. We thus take the word distance into consideration when generating the chaotic word orders. Extensive experiments on several text classification data sets show that the EA model consistently outperforms the selected baselines in terms of averaged after-attack accuracy, modification rate, query number, and semantic similarity. And human evaluation results reveal that humans difficultly perceive the adversarial examples generated by the EA model. In addition, quantitative and qualitative analyses further validate the effectiveness of the EA model, including that the generated adversarial examples are grammatically correct and semantically preserved.

Multiview clustering (MVC) collects complementary and abundant information, which draws much attention in machine learning and data mining community. Existing MVC methods usually hold the assumption that all the views are complete. However, multiple source data are often incomplete in real-world applications, and so on sensor failure or unfinished collection process, which gives rise to incomplete multiview clustering (IMVC). Although enormous efforts have been devoted in IMVC, there still are some urgent issues that need to be solved: (i) The locality among multiple views has not been utilized in the existing mechanism; (ii) Existing methods inappropriately force all the views to share consensus representation while ignoring specific structures. In this paper, we propose a novel method termed partial MVC with locality graph regularization to address these issues. First, followed the traditional IMVC approaches, we construct weighted semi-nonnegative matrix factorization models to handle incomplete multiview data. Then, upon the consensus representation matrix, the locality graph is constructed for regularizing the shared feature matrix. Moreover, we add the coefficient regression term to constraint the various base matrices among views. We incorporate the three aforementioned processes into a unified framework, whereas they can negotiate with each other serving for learning tasks. An effective iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the resultant optimization problem with theoretically guaranteed convergence. The comprehensive experiment results on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Deep clustering gains superior performance than conventional clustering by jointly performing feature learning and cluster assignment. Although numerous deep clustering algorithms have emerged in various applications, most of them fail to learn robust cluster-oriented features which in turn hurts the final clustering performance. To solve this problem, we propose a two-stage deep clustering algorithm by incorporating data augmentation and self-paced learning. Specifically, in the first stage, we learn robust features by training an autoencoder with examples that are augmented by random shifting and rotating the given clean examples. Then, in the second stage, we encourage the learned features to be cluster-oriented by alternatively finetuning the encoder with the augmented examples and updating the cluster assignments of the clean examples. During finetuning the encoder, the target of each augmented example in the loss function is the center of the cluster to which the clean example is assigned. The targets may be computed incorrectly, and the examples with incorrect targets could mislead the encoder network. To stabilize the network training, we select most confident examples in each iteration by utilizing the adaptive self-paced learning. Extensive experiments validate that our algorithm outperforms the state of the arts on four image datasets.

Feature extraction and feature selection have been regarded as two independent dimensionality reduction methods in most of the existing literature. In this paper, we propose to integrate both approaches into a unified framework and design an unsupervised linear feature selective projection (FSP) for feature extraction with low-rank embedding and dual Laplacian regularization, with the aim to exploit the intrinsic relationship among data and suppress the impact of noise. Specifically, a projection matrix with an l2,1-norm regularization is introduced to project original high dimensional data points into a new subspace with lower dimension, where the l2,1-norm regularization can endow the projection with good interpretability. We deploy a coefficient matrix with low rank constraint to reconstruct the data points and the l2,1-norm is imposed to regularize the data reconstruction errors in the low-dimensional subspace and make FSP robust to noise. Furthermore, a dual graph Laplacian regularization term is imposed on the low dimensional data and data reconstruction matrix for preserving the local manifold geometrical structure of data. Finally, an alternatively iterative algorithm is carefully designed for solving the proposed optimization model. Theoretical convergence and computational complexity analysis of the algorithm are also provided. Comprehensive experiments on various benchmark datasets have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed FSP. As indicated, our algorithm significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for feature extraction.