Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Haoyang Liu, Jian Luo, Jiarui Yu, Hande Dong, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Jiawei Chen. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jian Luo, Jianqing Zhang, Yuyan Zhou, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Hande Dong, Jiawei Chen. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Tensor-based multi-view clustering algorithms have attracted considerable attention due to their superior clustering performance. However, these algorithms typically treat each view independently, failing to utilize the complementary information across all views, thus lacking globality. Additionally, employing low-rank tensor constraints to extract consistent information among views may result in the loss of important information due to weak consistency constraints. These limitations significantly hinder the clustering performance. To address these issues, we propose Simple Multi-view Tensor Clustering (SimMTC), which achieves globality and strong consistency. SimMTC first applies Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to the anchor graphs to obtain high-frequency and low-frequency information, which encode similarities between samples and anchors from all views, thereby capturing global information. Orthogonal tensor factorization is then conducted in the frequency domain. Moreover, a novel strong consistency constraint based on FFT is introduced, which enhances the extraction of consistent information in the frequency domain. What's more, an efficient alternating optimization algorithm is designed to solve the optimization problem in SimMTC. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SimMTC achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance. The code has been made publicly available on GitHub at: https://github.com/haonanxin/SimMTC_code.

K-means algorithm divides samples into c classes based on their structural characteristics. However, due to the non convex nature of the clustering problem, algorithms are prone to converge to poor local minima. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose the Local Structure Preserving Clustering with Learnable Anchors (LSPC-LA) method. We assume that with a well-designed anchor selection strategy, samples near the same anchor tend to belong to the same cluster, which reveal high confidence Must-Link local structural information for clustering. Based on this observation, we first construct an anchor-based bipartite graph, transforming the sample clustering problem into anchor clustering problem by local structural information, thus reducing the solution space and minimizing the risk of poor local minima. Then we create an anchor guiding matrix to allow anchors to learn the sample structure, improving clustering performance. Subsequently, an alternating iterative algorithm is proposed to optimize the LSPC-LA model. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy of the local structural information and the effectiveness of LSPC-LA.

The representation learning of time series has a wide range of downstream tasks and applications in many practical scenarios. However, due to the complexity, spatiotemporality, and continuity of sequential stream data, compared with the representation learning of structural data such as images/videos, the time series self-supervised representation learning is even more challenging. Besides, the direct application of existing contrastive learning and masked autoencoder based approaches to time series representation learning encounters inherent theoretical limitations, such as ineffective augmentation and masking strategies. To this end, we propose a Language Pre-training guided Masking Representation Learning (LPMRL) for times series classification. Specifically, we first propose a novel language pre-training guided masking encoder for adaptively sampling semantic spatiotemporal patches via natural language descriptions and improving the discriminability of latent representations. Furthermore, we present the dual-information contrastive learning mechanism to explore both local and global information by meticulously designing high-quality hard negative samples of time series data samples. As a result, we also design various experiments, such as visualization of masking position and distribution and reconstruction error to verify the reasonability of proposed language guided masking technique. Last, we evaluate the performance of proposed representation learning via classification task conducted on 106 time series datasets, which demonstrates the effectiveness of proposed method.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a prominent approach for learning from graph-structured data. However, their effectiveness can be significantly compromised when the graph structure is suboptimal. To address this issue, Graph Structure Learning (GSL) has emerged as a promising technique that refines node connections adaptively. Nevertheless, we identify two key limitations in existing GSL methods: 1) Most methods primarily focus on node similarity to construct relationships, while overlooking the quality of node information. Blindly connecting low-quality nodes and aggregating their ambiguous information can degrade the performance of other nodes. 2) The constructed graph structures are often constrained to be symmetric, which may limit the model's flexibility and effectiveness.

Graph Neural Networks have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in various graph-based tasks, but their inefficiency in training and inference poses significant challenges for scaling to real-world, large-scale applications. To address these challenges, a plethora of algorithms have been developed to accelerate GNN training and inference, garnering substantial interest from the research community. This paper presents a systematic review of these acceleration algorithms, categorizing them into three main topics: training acceleration, inference acceleration, and execution acceleration. For training acceleration, we discuss techniques like graph sampling and GNN simplification. In inference acceleration, we focus on knowledge distillation, GNN quantization, and GNN pruning. For execution acceleration, we explore GNN binarization and graph condensation. Additionally, we review several libraries related to GNN acceleration, including our Scalable Graph Learning library, and propose future research directions.

Support Vector Machine (SVM) stands out as a prominent machine learning technique widely applied in practical pattern recognition tasks. It achieves binary classification by maximizing the "margin", which represents the minimum distance between instances and the decision boundary. Although many efforts have been dedicated to expanding SVM for multi-class case through strategies such as one versus one and one versus the rest, satisfactory solutions remain to be developed. In this paper, we propose a novel method for multi-class SVM that incorporates pairwise class loss considerations and maximizes the minimum margin. Adhering to this concept, we embrace a new formulation that imparts heightened flexibility to multi-class SVM. Furthermore, the correlations between the proposed method and multiple forms of multi-class SVM are analyzed. The proposed regularizer, akin to the concept of "margin", can serve as a seamless enhancement over the softmax in deep learning, providing guidance for network parameter learning. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method over existing multi-classification methods. Complete version is available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.06578.pdf. Code is available at https://github.com/zz-haooo/M3SVM.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as the predominant approach for analyzing graph data on the web and beyond. Contrastive learning (CL), a self-supervised paradigm, not only mitigates reliance on annotations but also has potential in performance. The hard negative sampling strategy that benefits CL in other domains proves ineffective in the context of Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) due to the message passing mechanism. Embracing the subspace hypothesis in clustering, we propose a method towards expansive and adaptive hard negative mining, referred to as G raph contR astive leA rning via subsP ace prE serving (GRAPE ). Beyond homophily, we argue that false negatives are prevalent over an expansive range and exploring them confers benefits upon GCL. Diverging from existing neighbor-based methods, our method seeks to mine long-range hard negatives throughout subspace, where message passing is conceived as interactions between subspaces. %Empirical investigations back up this strategy. Additionally, our method adaptively scales the hard negatives set through subspace preservation during training. In practice, we develop two schemes to enhance GCL that are pluggable into existing GCL frameworks. The underlying mechanisms are analyzed and the connections to related methods are investigated. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms across diverse graph datasets and remains competitive across varied application scenarios\footnoteOur code is available at https://github.com/zz-haooo/WWW24-GRAPE. .

Ensemble clustering has emerged as a powerful framework for analyzing heterogeneous and complex data. Despite the abundance of existing schemes, co-association matrix-based methods remain the mainstream approach. However, focusing solely on pairwise correlations falls short of fully capturing the intricate cluster relationships. Moreover, despite its potential, ensemble clustering has yet to effectively leverage the powerful representation capabilities of neural networks. To address these limitations, we propose a deep ensemble clustering method called Ensemble Clustering with Attentional Representation (ECAR). Our method considers the results of base partition as groups with related information to explore higher-order fusion information. ECAR captures the importance of each sample's association with its related group by employing an attentional network, and encodes this information into a low-dimensional representation. The attentional network is trained by jointly optimizing the clustering loss from soft assignments learned from the embeddings and the reconstruction loss from the weighted graph generated from ensemble clustering. During training, the weights of base partitions are adaptively refined to promote diversity and consistency while reducing the impact of low-quality and redundant base partitions. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the substantial improvement of our method over existing baseline ensemble clustering methods and deep clustering methods.

Most of the existing multi-view clustering algorithms are performed in the original feature space, and their performance in heavily reliant on the quality of the raw data. Besides, some two-stage strategies cannot achieve ideal results due to the absence of capturing the correlation between views. In view of this, we propose Multi-View K-means with Laplacian Embedding (MVKLE), which is capable of clustering multi-view data in the learned embedding space. Specifically, we employ local structure-preserving dimensionality reduction to obtain the underlying representation of each view, and obtain the clustering results directly through an effective optimization formulation. Experiments on several common multi-view datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.