Multi-view Granular-ball Contrastive Clustering

TL;DR

This paper introduces MGBCC, a multi-view contrastive clustering method that uses granular balls to preserve local structures and improve cross-view associations, addressing limitations of existing approaches.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel multi-view contrastive clustering approach using granular balls to better capture local structures and cross-view relationships.

Findings

Outperforms existing multi-view clustering methods in experiments.

Effectively preserves local topological structures.

Reduces false negatives and improves model discriminability.

Abstract

Previous multi-view contrastive learning methods typically operate at two scales: instance-level and cluster-level. Instance-level approaches construct positive and negative pairs based on sample correspondences, aiming to bring positive pairs closer and push negative pairs further apart in the latent space. Cluster-level methods focus on calculating cluster assignments for samples under each view and maximize view consensus by reducing distribution discrepancies, e.g., minimizing KL divergence or maximizing mutual information. However, these two types of methods either introduce false negatives, leading to reduced model discriminability, or overlook local structures and cannot measure relationships between clusters across views explicitly. To this end, we propose a method named Multi-view Granular-ball Contrastive Clustering (MGBCC). MGBCC segments the sample set into coarse-grained granular balls, and establishes associations between intra-view and cross-view granular balls. These associations are reinforced in a shared latent space, thereby achieving multi-granularity contrastive learning. Granular balls lie between instances and clusters, naturally preserving the local topological structure of the sample set. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.