Learning to Discriminate While Contrasting: Combating False Negative Pairs With Coupled Contrastive Learning for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

The task of incomplete multi-view clustering (IMvC) aims to partition multi-view data with a lack of completeness into different clusters. The incompleteness can be typically categorized into the case of instance-missing and view-unaligned MvC. However, prior methods either consider each of them or struggle to pursue consistent latent representations among views. In this paper, we propose two forms of contrastive learning paradigms to jointly handle both cases for IMvC. Specifically, we design an instance-oriented contrastive (IOC) learning strategy to achieve intra-class consistency. As negative samples within different datasets can exhibit diverse distributions, we formulate a parameterized boundary for IOC learning to flexibly deal with such differing data modes. To preserve inter-view consistency, we further devise category-oriented contrastive (COC) learning such that data from different views can be seamlessly integrated into a combined semantic space. We also recover the missing instances with the learned latent representations in a reconstructing manner for realigning the incomplete multi-view data to facilitate clustering. Our approach unifies the solution to both incomplete cases into one formulation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct four types of MvC tasks on six benchmark multi-view datasets and compare our method against state-of-the-art IMvC methods. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, quantitatively and qualitatively.