With the rapid growth of multimodal and multi-view data, multi-view bipartite graph clustering (MVBGC) has emerged as a promising solution for large-scale tasks, which with linear complexity. However, most methods adhere to a unidirectional “encoding” design, where the bipartite graph is directly constructed from input data. Enlightened by the prevalent encoding-decoding in deep learning, this paper rethinks existing paradigms and proposes a novel “auto-encoding” MVBGC framework, named BGAE. Our model seamlessly integrates encoding, bipartite graph learning, and decoding modules within a self-supervised learning framework. The encoding module extracts a joint representation from input data, the bipartite graph learning module learns a discriminative bipartite graph in latent semantic space, and the decoding module reconstructs the input data by the structural information. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our novel design, particularly highlighting the critical role of “decoding” learning. This work represents the first attempt to explore encoding-decoding design in MVBGC.

Bipartite graph clustering (BGC) has emerged as a fast-growing research in the clustering community. Despite BGC has achieved promising scalability, most variants still suffer from the following concerns: a) Susceptibility to noisy features. They construct bipartite graphs in the raw feature space, inducing poor robustness to noisy features. b) Inflexible anchor selection strategies. They usually select anchors through heuristic sampling or constrained learning methods, degrading flexibility. c) Partial structure mining. Existing methods are mainly built upon Linear Reconstruction Paradigm (LRP) from subspace clustering or Locally Linear Paradigm (LLP) from manifold learning, which partially exploit linear or locally linear structures, lacking a unified perspective to integrate global complementary structures. To this end, we propose a novel model, termedJoint Robust Embedding and Structural FusionBipartiteGraphClustering (JetBGC), which focuses on three aspects, namely robustness, flexibility, and complementarity. Concretely, we first introduce a robust embedding learning module to extract latent representation that can reduce the impact of noisy features. Then, we optimize anchors via a constraint-free strategy that can flexibly capture data distribution. Furthermore, we revisit the consistency and specificity of LRP and LLP, and design a new unified structural fusion strategy to integrate both linear and locally linear structures from a global perspective. Therefore, JetBGC unifies robust representation learning, flexible anchor optimization, and structural bipartite graph fusion in a framework. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate our effectiveness against existing baselines.

Unsupervised multi-view bipartite graph clustering (MVBGC) is a fast-growing research, due to promising scalability in large-scale tasks. Although many variants are proposed by various strategies, a common design is to construct the bipartite graph directly from the input data, i.e. only consider the unidirectional “encoding” process. However, “encoding-decoding” mechanism is a popular design for deep learning, the most representative one is auto-encoder (AE). Enlightened by this, this paper rethinks existing MVBGC paradigms and transfers the “encoding-decoding” design into graph machine learning, and proposes a novel framework termed auto-encoding multi-view bipartite graph clustering (BGAE), which integrates encoding, bipartite graph construction, and decoding modules in a self-supervised learning manner. The encoding module extracts a latent joint representation from the input data, the bipartite graph construction module learns a bipartite graph with connectivity constraint in latent semantic space, and the decoding module recreates the input data via the bipartite graph. Therefore, our novel BGAE combines representation learning, bipartite graph learning, reconstruction learning, and label inference into a unified framework. All the modules are seamlessly integrated and mutually reinforcing for clustering-friendly purposes. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of our novel design and the significance of “decoding” process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to explore “encoding-decoding” design in traditional MVBGC. The code is provided athttps://github.com/liliangnudt/BGAE.

Unsupervised bipartite graph learning has been a hotpot in multi-view clustering, to tackle the restricted scalability issue of traditional full graph clustering in large-scale applications. However, the existing bipartite graph clustering paradigm pays little attention to the adverse impact of noisy features on learning process. To further facilitate this part of research, apart from simply reweighting features to depress the noisy ones, we take the first step towards analyzing the induced adverse impact via theoretical and experimental investigations. One crucial finding in this paper is that the existence of noisy features will incur “anchor shift” phenomenon, which deviates the potential representations of anchors and then degrades performance. To this end, we propose a coupled noisy feature filter mechanism with automatically finding feature importance to remedy the anchor shift issue in this paper. Apart from leveraging features, we theoretically analyze the bounds of proposed feature-adaptive bipartite graph's fuzzy membership. Specifically, distinguishing features' discrimination will increase the fuzzy membership to achieve soft partitions against the potential inaccurate absolute relationship. With the afore-mentioned merits, our proposed multi-view bipartite graph clustering with coupled noisy feature filter model (MVBGC-NFF) provides novel and interesting insights on the feature level of anchor shift. The effectiveness and efficiency of MVBGC-NFF are demonstrated on synthetic and real-world datasets with improving clustering performance, increasing fuzzy membership, and filtering noisy features. The code is available onhttps://github.com/liliangnudt/MVBGC-NFF.