Multi-view clustering (MVC) leverages complementary information across heterogeneous views to improve unsupervised partitioning. Nevertheless, the majority of existing MVC methods critically assume that samples are fully aligned across views, an assumption frequently violated in practice when multi-view data are collected from independent sources without any correspondence. This gives rise to Completely Unaligned multi-view Clustering (CUC), where cross-view sample correspondences are entirely unknown, fundamentally impeding effective multi-view fusion. Prior CUC-oriented methods typically infer inter-view relations from distance/similarity matrices; however, severe cross-view heterogeneity often induces over-smoothing in such matrices, leading to unreliable matching signals and degraded clustering performance. To address these issues, we propose Cross-view Graph Matching for Completely Unaligned multi-view Clustering (CGM-CUC), a unified framework that couples structure-aware representation learning with progressive cross-view alignment. Specifically, CGM-CUC introduces a bipartite graph-based sample re-encoding mechanism to enhance discriminative structural cues, and an iterative cross-view matching network that progressively refines permutation matrices to recover latent correspondences. Moreover, we develop an alignment-guided optimization strategy that mitigates the over-smoothing effect in similarity estimation, thereby stabilizing the matching process and improving downstream clustering. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CGM-CUC consistently achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines, with particularly notable gains under fully unaligned view settings.

Anchor-based multi-view graph clustering has recently gained popularity as an effective approach for clustering data with multiple views. However, existing methods have limitations in terms of handling inconsistent information and noise across views, resulting in an unreliable consensus representation. Additionally, post-processing is needed to obtain final results after anchor graph construction, which negatively affects clustering performance. In this paper, we propose a Robust and Consistent Anchor Graph Learning method (RCAGL) for multi-view clustering to address these challenges. RCAGL constructs a consistent anchor graph that captures inter-view commonality and filters out view-specific noise by learning a consistent part and a view-specific part simultaneously. A k-connectivity constraint is imposed on the consistent anchor graph, leading to a clear graph structure and direct generation of cluster labels without additional post-processing. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of RCAGL in terms of clustering accuracy, scalability to large-scale data, and robustness to view-specific noise, outperforming advanced multi-view clustering methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Tracesource/RCAGL.

Benefiting from the strong reasoning capabilities, Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in recommender systems. Various efforts have been made to distill knowledge from LLMs to enhance collaborative models, employing techniques like contrastive learning for representation alignment. In this work, we prove that directly aligning the representations of LLMs and collaborative models is suboptimal for enhancing downstream recommendation tasks performance, based on the information theorem. Consequently, the challenge of effectively aligning semantic representations between collaborative models and LLMs remains unresolved. Inspired by this viewpoint, we propose a novel plug-and-play alignment framework for LLMs and collaborative models. Specifically, we first disentangle the latent representations of both LLMs and collaborative models into specific and shared components via projection layers and representation regularization. Subsequently, we perform both global and local structure alignment on the shared representations to facilitate knowledge transfer. Additionally, we theoretically prove that the specific and shared representations contain more pertinent and less irrelevant information, which can enhance the effectiveness of downstream recommendation tasks. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method is superior to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

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.

Multi-view graph clustering (MVGC) explores pairwise correlations of entire instances and comprehensively aggregates diverse source information with optimal graph structure. One major issue of practical MVGC is the high time and space complexities prohibiting being applied on large-scale applications. As a promising solution of addressing large-scale problems, anchor-based strategy identifies small portion and key landmarks to serve as replacements for the entire dataset. Despite of its efficiency, anchors chosen across views may be semantically unaligned contrasting to naturally-aligned full sample setting, which may lead to the latter inappropriate graph fusion. Limited attention has been focused on the mentioned Multi-View Anchor-Unaligned Problem (MV-AUP) in the existing literature. In this paper, we first revisit existing multi-view anchor graph clustering frameworks and present the MV-AUP phenomenon. Then, we propose a novelMulti-viewCorrespondingAnchorGraphAlignmentFusion framework (MV-CAGAF), which elegantly solves MV-AUP with structural representation matching in multi-dimensional spaces. Further, we theoretically prove our proposed structural matching approach can be regarded as minimizing the EMD distance of the two relative anchor distributions. Based on this, we design the innovative multi-view anchor graph fusion paradigm with correspondence alignment, which inherits the linear sample complexity for scalable cross-view clustering. Our proposed MV-CAGAF achieves significant improvements with the help of the novel fusion framework on comprehensive benchmark datasets. Most importantly, the experimental results on both of the simulated and real-world datasets significantly prove the importance of cross-view alignment for large-scale multi-view clustering.

Deep learning has been widely applied in recommender systems, which has recently achieved revolutionary progress. However, most existing learning-based methods assume that the user and item distributions remain unchanged between the training phase and the test phase. However, the distribution of user and item features can naturally shift in real-world scenarios, potentially resulting in a substantial decrease in recommendation performance. This phenomenon can be formulated as an Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) recommendation problem. To address this challenge, we propose a novelDualTest-Time-Training framework forOODRecommendation, termedDT3OR. In DT3OR, we incorporate a model adaptation mechanism during the test-time phase to carefully update the recommendation model, allowing the model to adapt specially to the shifting user and item features. To be specific, we propose a self-distillation task and a contrastive task to assist the model learning both the user’s invariant interest preferences and the variant user/item characteristics during the test-time phase, thus facilitating a smooth adaptation to the shifting features. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the rationale behind our dual test-time training framework. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to address OOD recommendation via a test-time-training strategy. We conduct experiments on five datasets with various backbones. Comprehensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of DT3OR compared to other state-of-the-art baselines.

Dynamic ensemble has significantly greater potential space to improve the classification of imbalanced data compared to static ensemble. However, dynamic ensemble schemes are far less successful than static ensemble methods in the imbalanced learning field. Through an in-depth analysis on the behavior characteristics of dynamic ensemble, we find that there are some important problems that need to be addressed to release the full potential of dynamic ensemble, including but not limited to, correcting the component classifiers’ bias towards the majority classes, increasing the proportions of the positive classifiers (i.e., the component classifiers making correct prediction) for difficult samples, and providing the accurate competence estimations on the hard-to-classify samples w.r.t the classifier pool. Inspired by these, we propose a Dynamic Ensemble Framework for imbalanced data classification (imDEF). imDEF first uses the data generation method OREM$\mathrm{_{G}}$to generate multiple artificial synthetic datasets, which have diverse class distributions by rebalancing the original imbalanced data. Based on each of such synthetic datasets, imDEF then utilizes a Classification Error-aware Self-Paced Sampling Ensemble (SPSE$\mathrm{_{CE}}$) method to gradually focus more on difficult samples, to create a low-biased classifier pool and increase the proportions of the positive classifiers for the difficult samples. Finally, imDEF constructs a referee system to achieve the competence estimations by leveraging an Ensemble Margin-aware Self-Paced Sampling Ensemble (SPSE$\mathrm{_{EM}}$) method. SPSE$\mathrm{_{EM}}$incrementally strengthens the learning of the hard-to-classify samples, so that the competent levels of component classifiers could be estimated accurately. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of imDEF. The source codes have been made publicly available on GitHub.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved promising performance in semi-supervised node classification in recent years. However, the problem of insufficient supervision, together with representation collapse, largely limits the performance of the GNNs in this field. To alleviate the collapse of node representations in semi-supervised scenario, we propose a novel graph contrastive learning method, termed M ixed G raph C ontrastive N etwork (MGCN). In our method, we improve the discriminative capability of the latent embeddings by an interpolation-based augmentation strategy and a correlation reduction mechanism. Specifically, we first conduct the interpolation-based augmentation in the latent space and then force the prediction model to change linearly between samples. Second, we enable the learned network to tell apart samples across two interpolation-perturbed views through forcing the correlation matrix across views to approximate an identity matrix. By combining the two settings, we extract rich supervision information from both the abundant unlabeled nodes and the rare yet valuable labeled nodes for discriminative representation learning. Extensive experimental results on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and the generality of MGCN compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. The code of MGCN is available at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/MGCN on Github.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great potential in representation learning for various graph tasks. However, the distribution shift between the training and test sets poses a challenge to the efficiency of GNNs. To address this challenge, HomoTTT proposes a fully test-time training framework for GNNs to enhance the model’s generalization capabilities for node classification tasks. Specifically, our proposed HomoTTT designs a homophily-based and parameter-free graph contrastive learning task with adaptive augmentation to guide the model’s adaptation during the test-time training, allowing the model to adapt for specific target data. In the inference stage, HomoTTT proposes to integrate the original GNN model and the adapted model after TTT using a homophily-based model selection method, which prevents potential performance degradation caused by unconstrained model adaptation. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. Additionally, the exploratory study further validates the rationality of the homophily-based graph contrastive learning task with adaptive augmentation and the homophily-based model selection designed in HomoTTT .

Anchor-based multi-view graph clustering has recently gained popularity as an effective approach for clustering data with multiple views. However, existing methods have limitations in terms of handling inconsistent information and noise across views, resulting in an unreliable consensus representation. Additionally, post-processing is needed to obtain final results after anchor graph construction, which negatively affects clustering performance. In this paper, we propose a Robust and Consistent Anchor Graph Learning method (RCAGL) for multi-view clustering to address these challenges. RCAGL constructs a consistent anchor graph that captures inter-view commonality and filters out view-specific noise by learning a consistent part and a view-specific part simultaneously. A$k$-connectivity constraint is imposed on the consistent anchor graph, leading to a clear graph structure and direct generation of cluster labels without additional post-processing. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of RCAGL in terms of clustering accuracy, scalability to large-scale data, and robustness to view-specific noise, outperforming advanced multi-view clustering methods. Our code is publicly available athttps://github.com/Tracesource/RCAGL.

Multiple Kernel Clustering (MKC) has emerged as a prominent research domain in recent decades due to its capacity to exploit diverse information from multiple views by learning an optimal kernel. Despite the successes achieved by various MKC methods, a significant challenge lies in the computational complexity associated with generating a consensus partition from the optimal kernel matrix, typically of size$n \times n$, where$n$represents the number of samples. This computational bottleneck restricts the practical applicability of these methods when confronted with large-scale datasets. Furthermore, certain existing MKC algorithms derive the consensus partition matrix by fusing all base partitions. However, this fusion process may inadvertently overlook critical information embedded in individual base kernels, potentially leading to inferior clustering performance. In light of these challenges, we introduce an innovative and efficient multiple kernel$k$-means approach, denoted as FAMKKM. Notably, FAMKKM incorporates two approximated partition matrices instead of the original individual partition matric for each base kernel. This strategic substitution significantly reduces computational complexity. Additionally, FAMKKM leverages the original kernel information to guide the fusion of all base partitions, thereby enhancing the quality of the resulting consensus partition matrix. Finally, we substantiate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed FAMKKM through extensive experiments conducted on six benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-art methods. The demo code of this work is publicly available athttps://github.com/WangJun2023/FAMKKM

Multi-view clustering has attracted increasing attention in data mining communities. Despite superior clustering performance, we observe that existing multi-view subspace clustering methods directly fuse multi-view information in the similarity level by merging noisy affinity matrices; and isolate the processes of affinity learning, multiple information fusion and clustering. Both factors may cause insufficient utilization of multi-view information, leading to unsatisfying clustering performance. This paper proposes a novel consensus one-step multi-view subspace clustering (COMVSC) method to address these issues. Instead of directly fusing affinity matrices, COMVSC optimally integrates discriminative partition-level information, which is helpful in eliminating noise among data. Moreover, the affinity matrices, consensus representation and final clustering labels are learned simultaneously in a unified framework. Extensive experiment results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art approaches.

Multi-view spectral clustering, which exploits the complementary information among graphs of diverse views to obtain superior clustering results, has attracted intensive attention recently. However, most existing multi-view spectral clustering methods obtain the clustering partitions in a two-step scheme, i.e., spectral embedding and subsequent$k$-means. This two-step scheme inevitably seeks sub-optimal clustering results due to the information loss during the two-steps processes. Besides, existing multi-view spectral clustering methods do not jointly utilize the information of graphs and embedding matrices, which also degrades final clustering results. To solve these issues, we propose a unified one-step multi-view spectral clustering method, which integrates the spectral embedding and$k$-means into a unified framework to obtain discrete clustering labels with a one-step strategy. Under the observation that the inner product of the embedding matrix is a low-rank approximation of the graph, we combine graphs and embedding matrices of different views to obtain a unified graph. Then, we directly capture the discrete clustering indicator matrix from the unified graph. Furthermore, we design an effective optimization algorithm to solve the resultant problem. Finally, a set of experiments on various datasets are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The demo code of this work is publicly available atrgb]0,0,1https://github.com/guanyuezhen/UOMvSC.

This paper proposes a simple interpolation Oversampling method with the purpose of Reliably Expanding the Minority class regions (OREM). OREM first finds the candidate minority region around each original minority sample, then exploits this region to further identify those clean subregions without distributing any majority sample. The synthetic samples are only allowed to generate in the clean subregions, so that the regions of the minority class can be broadened reliably. Given that the learning from multiclass imbalanced data is more challenging as compared to two-class scenarios, we also extend OREM to handle multiclass imbalance problems by leveraging an iteration procedure of generating synthetic samples, consequently leading to a multiclass oversampling algorithm OREM-M. The key peculiarity of OREM-M is to reduce the class overlapping not only between the synthetic minority and original samples, but also from the synthetic samples of different minority classes. In this way, OREM-M ensures that the data of each class after oversampling can be modeled well. In addition, we embed OREM into boosting framework to develop a new ensemble method OREMBoost addressing class imbalance problems. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed OREM, OREM-M, and OREMBoost.

Multi-view spectral clustering can effectively reveal the intrinsic cluster structure among data by performing clustering on the learned optimal embedding across views. Though demonstrating promising performance in various applications, most of existing methods usually linearly combine a group of pre-specified first-order Laplacian matrices to construct the optimal Laplacian matrix, which may result in limited representation capability and insufficient information exploitation. Also, storing and implementing complex operations on the{$n\times n}$Laplacian matrices incurs intensive storage and computation complexity. To address these issues, this paper first proposes a multi-view spectral clustering algorithm that learns a high-order optimal neighborhood Laplacian matrix, and then extends it to the late fusion version for accurate and efficient multi-view clustering. Specifically, our proposed algorithm generates the optimal Laplacian matrix by searching the neighborhood of the linear combination of both the first-order and high-order base Laplacian matrices simultaneously. By this way, the representative capacity of the learned optimal Laplacian matrix is enhanced, which is helpful to better utilize the hidden high-order connection information among data, leading to improved clustering performance. We design an efficient algorithm with proved convergence to solve the resultant optimization problem. Extensive experimental results on nine datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm

Multi-view clustering has attracted increasing attention in multimedia, machine learning and data mining communities. As one kind of the essential multi-view clustering algorithm, multi-view subspace clustering (MVSC) becomes more and more popular due to its strong ability to reveal the intrinsic low dimensional clustering structure hidden across views. Despite superior clustering performance in various applications, we observe that existing MVSC methodsdirectly fuse multi-view information in the similarity level by merging noisy affinity matrices; andisolate the processes of affinity learning, multi-view information fusion and clustering. Both factors may cause insufficient utilization of multi-view information, leading to unsatisfying clustering performance. This paper proposes a novel consensus one-step multi-view subspace clustering (COMVSC) method to address these issues. Instead of directly fusing multiple affinity matrices, COMVSC optimally integrates discriminative partition-level information, which is helpful to eliminate noise among data. Moreover, the affinity matrices, consensus representation and final clustering labels matrix are learned simultaneously in a unified framework. By doing so, the three steps can negotiate with each other to best serve the clustering task, leading to improved performance. Accordingly, we propose an iterative algorithm to solve the resulting optimization problem. Extensive experiment results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method against other state-of-the-art approaches.

Deep autoencoder-based methods are the majority of deep anomaly detection. An autoencoder learning on training data is assumed to produce higher reconstruction error for the anomalous samples than the normal samples and thus can distinguish anomalies from normal data. However, this assumption does not always hold in practice, especially in unsupervised anomaly detection, where the training data is anomaly contaminated. We observe that the autoencoder generalizes so well on the training data that it can reconstruct both the normal data and the anomalous data well, leading to poor anomaly detection performance. Besides, we find that anomaly detection performance is not stable when using reconstruction error as anomaly score, which is unacceptable in the unsupervised scenario. Because there are no labels to guide on selecting a proper model. To mitigate these drawbacks for autoencoder-based anomaly detection methods, we propose an Improved AutoEncoder for unsupervised Anomaly Detection (IAEAD). Specifically, we manipulate feature space to make normal data points closer using anomaly detection-based loss as guidance. Different from previous methods, by integrating the anomaly detection-based loss and autoencoder's reconstruction loss, IAEAD can jointly optimize for anomaly detection tasks and learn representations that preserve the local data structure to avoid feature distortion. Experiments on five image data sets empirically validate the effectiveness and stability of our method.

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) methods aim at integrating an optimal partition from a set of precalculated kernel matrices. Though achieving success in various applications, we observe that existing MKC methods: (i) lack of representation flexibility; and (ii) do not considerably preserve the locality structure in partition space. These issues may adversely affect the learning procedure of MKC, leading to unsatisfying clustering performance. In this paper, we propose a late fusion MKC method with local graph refinement to address the aforementioned issues. Different from existing MKC mechanisms, our method unifies the traditional weighted multiple kernel k-means, kernel partition, and graph construction into a single optimization procedure. The local graph is utilized to preserve the locality information in partition space and therefore all of the counterparts can be boosted for mutual clustering improvements. By this way, our approach enhances the local graph structure in partition space and enjoys more flexible kernel representations, leading to significant clustering improvements. Moreover, a three-step alternate algorithm is developed to solve the resultant optimization problem with proved convergence. Extensive experiments are conducted on several multiple kernel benchmark datasets to compare the proposed algorithm with the state-of-the-art ones, and the results well demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority.

Recently, convex-concave bilinear Saddle Point Problems (SPP) is widely used in lasso problems, Support Vector Machines, game theory, and so on. Previous researches have proposed many methods to solve SPP, and present their convergence rate theoretically. To achieve linear convergence, analysis in those previouse studies requires strong convexity of φ( z ). But, we find the linear convergence can also be achieved even for a general convex but not strongly convex φ( z ). In the article, by exploiting the strong duality of SPP, we propose a new method to solve SPP, and achieve the linear convergence. We present a new general sufficient condition to achieve linear convergence, but do not require the strong convexity of φ( z ). Furthermore, a more efficient method is also proposed, and its convergence rate is analyzed in theoretical. Our analysis shows that the well conditioned φ( z ) is necessary to improve the efficiency of our method. Finally, we conduct extensive empirical studies to evaluate the convergence performance of our methods.

Simultaneous clustering and optimization (SCO) has recently drawn much attention due to its wide range of practical applications. Many methods have been previously proposed to solve this problem and obtain the optimal model. However, when a dataset evolves over time, those existing methods have to update the model frequently to guarantee accuracy; such updating is computationally infeasible. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of SCO to handle evolving datasets. Specifically, we propose a new variant of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve this problem efficiently. The guarantee of model accuracy is analyzed theoretically for two specific tasks: ridge regression and convex clustering. Extensive empirical studies confirm the effectiveness of our method.

As a metric to measure the performance of an online method, dynamic regret with switching cost has drawn much attention for online decision making problems. Although the sublinear regret has been provided in much previous research, we still have little knowledge about the relation between the dynamic regret and the switching cost . In the article, we investigate the relation for two classic online settings: Online Algorithms (OA) and Online Convex Optimization (OCO). We provide a new theoretical analysis framework that shows an interesting observation; that is, the relation between the switching cost and the dynamic regret is different for settings of OA and OCO. Specifically, the switching cost has significant impact on the dynamic regret in the setting of OA. But it does not have an impact on the dynamic regret in the setting of OCO. Furthermore, we provide a lower bound of regret for the setting of OCO, which is same with the lower bound in the case of no switching cost. It shows that the switching cost does not change the difficulty of online decision making problems in the setting of OCO.

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.

Recently, network lasso has dawn much attention due to its remarkable performance on simultaneous clustering and optimization. However, it usually suffers from the imperfect data (noise, missing values, etc.), and yields sub-optimal solutions. The reason is that it finds the similar instances according to their features directly, which is usually impacted by the imperfect data, and thus returns sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose triangle lasso to avoid its disadvantage for graph datasets. In a graph dataset, each instance is represented by a vertex. If two instances have many common adjacent vertices, they tend to become similar. Although some instances are profiled by the imperfect data, it is still able to find the similar counterparts. Furthermore, we develop an efficient algorithm based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to obtain a moderately accurate solution. In addition, we present a dual method to obtain the accurate solution with the low additional time consumption. We demonstrate through extensive numerical experiments that triangle lasso is robust to the imperfect data. It usually yields a better performance than the state-of-the-art method when performing data analysis tasks in practical scenarios.