nmODE-MVC: Neural Memory ODE-Based Multi-View Clustering

Deep multi-view clustering (MVC) has recently gained significant interest for its capability to harness complementary information across multiple views through deep neural networks, enhancing clustering performance. However, existing deep MVC methods still have two issues: (1) They separate the feature learning objective and the clustering objective, potentially leading to suboptimal embedding features due to the neglect of the global clustering structure. (2) Most works utilize the target distribution obtained by the clustering objective to supervise feature learning. However, they simply sharpen the soft clustering distribution to obtain the target distribution, lacking the dynamics of the clustering process. To address these issues, in this paper we propose a novel end-to-end self-supervised multi-view clustering approach based on NeuralODEs, namely nmODE-MVC. Our approach operates in two stages: In the first stage, all view-embedded features are extracted, and then unified them into a global feature, facilitating global clustering assignments by exploiting multi-view data’s complementarity. The second stage leverages the dynamic attributes of NeuralODEs to dynamically refine the data features and generate a target distribution that actively drives the clustering decisions. We formulate these learning processes as a unified optimization problem, facilitating iterative training and refinement. The effectiveness of nmODE-MVC is validated through extensive experiments on multiple real-world multi-view datasets.