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Yazhou Ren

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24 papers

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JBHI Journal 2026 Journal Article

Dual Ontology-enhanced Clinical Decision Learning for First-admission Mortality Prediction

Fangchen Yin
Hu Nie
Xiaorong Pu
Pengcheng Zheng
Qilin Zhu
Yazhou Ren
Lijia Deng

Time-series based deep learning methods have significantly improved performance of predictive healthcare tasks on electronic health records (EHR) data. However, mortality prediction for first admissions is a huge challenge due to the absence of historical visit sequences. Analysis of major healthcare databases reveals that 55. 17% in MIMIC-IV and 83. 80% in MIMIC-III present with single visit records only. Many of these single-visit patients are admitted directly to ICU, highlighting the critical need for early prediction models that can inform timely interventions and substantially impact patient outcomes, even without longitudinal history. On first-admission mortality prediction, Dual Ontology-enhanced Clinical Decision learning (DOCD) has been proposed in this paper where we effectively leverage clinical knowledge through two key components. Dual ontology-enhanced learning extracts hierarchical representations from both diagnosis and procedure taxonomies. Furthermore, a priori-guided attention mechanism integrates clinical knowledge through probability based regularization to model the decision-making process. An information fusion is then employed to seamlessly integrate the demographic data, vital signs, and knowledge enhanced medical codes. Extensive experiments on MIMIC III (AUROC: 0. 9528, AUPRC: 0. 8971) and MIMIC-IV (AUROC: 0. 9817, AUPRC: 0. 8857) datasets demonstrate DOCD's superior performance over all baselines, offering interpretable visualizations aligned with established clinical knowledge.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Topology-Aware Vision Transformers for Enhanced Scene Recognition

Yunxi Wang
Shuaiyu Liu
Qiling Li
Yazhou Ren
Xiaorong Pu

Scene recognition (SR) is a fundamental task in computer vision (CV). In recent years, Transformer-based methods have achieved remarkable success in scene recognition tasks. Most existing approaches primarily rely on visual features, while failing to effectively model the structural relationships within scenes, which are crucial for accurate scene recognition. To this end, we propose Topology Attention Network for Scene Recognition (TANSR), an innovative method that leverages topological relationships from graphs to guide scene recognition. Specifically, Graph Attention Mask Generation Network (GAMGN) generates topology-aware masks from graph representations constructed by Graph Generation Module (GGM) and integrates them with patch embeddings by Topology Attention Guidance (TAG), enabling the transformer's attention mechanism to incorporate topological information. Furthermore, we introduce an innovative attention-driven multimodal fusion strategy that integrates graph-derived topological cues with visual patch embeddings, substantially enhancing the transformer’s capability to capture topological information and improving performance in complex scene recognition tasks. We evaluate TANSR on the benchmarks MIT-67, Scene-15 and SUN397, where it achieves consistent state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, including 98.58% accuracy on MIT-67.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Views Attention Fusion of Granular-ball Fuzzy Representations Split for Improved Multi-view Clustering

Shuaiyu Liu
Song Wu
Jie Xu
Yazhou Ren
Yang Yang
Xiaorong Pu
Guoying Wang

Multi-View Clustering (MVC) is a pivotal multi-view learning paradigm widely adopted across various fields. Despite recent advances, existing methods primarily focus on enhancing the performance of fused multi-view representation, often neglecting the issue of Representation Degradation (RD) arising from discrepancies in the intrinsic quality of different views. To address the limitations, we propose a novel Granular-ball Fuzzy Split and Attention Fusion (GFSAF) learning, which leverages the nature of granular-ball to extract mutual and complementary representation separately. Meanwhile, the proposed method introduces an attention variant for fused representations to mitigate the RD issue. GFSAF mainly consists of two training stages: Split-Extract Stage and Views-Fusion Stage. Specifically, we design a novel Granular-ball Fuzzy Contrastive Learning to extract mutual representation, and introduce Noise Stripping Loss to reduce the influence of noise for complementary representation. Then, a novel multi-head Cross Views Attention is proposed to employ attention mechanism from multi-view perspectives for comprehensive fused representations. Experimental results on eight databases demonstrate that our GFSAF achieves superior performance compared to several state-of-the-art MVC methods.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Fusion of Granular-Ball Visual Spatial Representations for Enhanced Facial Expression Recognition

Shuaiyu Liu
Qiyao Shen
Yunxi Wang
Yazhou Ren
Guoyin Wang

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Despite recent advances, significant challenges remain. Current methods primarily focus on extracting visual representations while overlooking other valuable information. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method called Component Separation and Granular-ball Space Bootstrap Fusion (CS-GBSBF), which leverages granular balls to transform visual images to spatial graphs, thereby enlarging the spatial information embedded in images. Our method separates the face into different components and utilizes the spatial information to bootstrap the fusion. More specifically, CS-GBSBF mainly consists of three crucial networks: Represent Extraction Network (REN), Represent Separation Network (RSN) and Represent Fusion Network (RFN). First, granular balls are used to represent expression images as graphs, which are fed into REN along with images. Then, RSN separates basic visual/spatial representations extracted from REN into a set of component visual/spatial representations. Next, RFN utilizes spatial representations to bootstrap component visual integration. A significant challenge in two-stream models is feature alignment, for which we have developed Attention Guidance Module (AGM) and Bootstrap Alignment Loss (L_BA) in REN and RFN, respectively. Results of experiment on eight databases show that CS-GBSBF consistently achieves higher recognition accuracy than several state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https: //github. com/Lsy235/CS-GBSBF.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Graph Embedded Contrastive Learning for Multi-View Clustering

Hongqing He
Jie Xu
Guoqiu Wen
Yazhou Ren
Na Zhao
Xiaofeng Zhu

Recently, numerous multi-view clustering (MVC) and multi-view graph clustering (MVGC) methods have been proposed. Despite significant progress, they still face two issues: I) MVC and MVGC are often developed independently for multi-view and multi-graph data. They have redundancy but lack a unified methodology to combine their strengths. II) Contrastive learning is usually adopted to explore the associations across multiple views. However, traditional contrastive losses ignore the neighbor relationship in multi-view scenarios and easily lead to false associations in sample pairs. To address these issues, we propose Graph Embedded Contrastive Learning for Multi-View Clustering. Concretely, we propose a process of view-specific pre-training with adaptive graph convolution to make our method compatible with both multi-view and multi-graph data, which aggregates the graph information into data and leverages autoencoders to learn view-specific representations. Furthermore, to explore the view-cross associations, we introduce the process of view-cross contrastive learning and clustering, where we propose the graph-guided contrastive learning that can generate global graph to mitigate the false association issue as well as the cluster-guided contrastive clustering for improving the model robustness. Finally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on both MVC and MVGC tasks.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SLR-MVTC: Smooth Low-Rank Multi-View Tensor Clustering

Zhen Long
Yipeng Liu
Yazhou Ren
Ce Zhu

Multi-view tensor clustering (MVTC) has gained much attention for its effectiveness in capturing global high-order correlations across views. However, current MVTC methods suffer from two limitations: 1) adopting a two-stage process to learn the latent features for clustering, and 2) either ignoring local similarities within views or treating local similarities and global high-order correlations equally. In this paper, we propose a smooth low-rank MVTC (SLR-MVTC) method, which aims to extract latent features that are smooth within each view and low-rank across views, enhancing clustering performance. Specifically, we first learn latent features from each view using orthogonal projection and then construct the latent feature tensor by concatenation and rotation. Then, we introduce a new smooth tensor nuclear norm to depict the low-rank components of the low-frequency parts in the feature tensor. Benefiting from the fast Fourier transform along the sample dimension, the obtained low-frequency components effectively capture local smoothness within views, while their low-rank parts further explore global correlations across views. Experimental results on six multi-view datasets demonstrate that SLR-MVTC outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of clustering performance and CPU time.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Adaptive Feature Imputation with Latent Graph for Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

Jingyu Pu
Chenhang Cui
Xinyue Chen
Yazhou Ren
Xiaorong Pu
Zhifeng Hao
Philip S. Yu
Lifang He

In recent years, incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC), which studies the challenging multi-view clustering problem on missing views, has received growing research interests. Previous IMVC methods suffer from the following issues: (1) the inaccurate imputation for missing data, which leads to suboptimal clustering performance, and (2) most existing IMVC models merely consider the explicit presence of graph structure in data, ignoring the fact that latent graphs of different views also provide valuable information for the clustering task. To overcome such challenges, we present a novel method, termed Adaptive feature imputation with latent graph for incomplete multi-view clustering (AGDIMC). Specifically, it captures the embbedded features of each view by incorporating the view-specific deep encoders. Then, we construct partial latent graphs on complete data, which can consolidate the intrinsic relationships within each view while preserving the topological information. With the aim of estimating the missing sample based on the available information, we utilize an adaptive imputation layer to impute the embedded feature of missing data by using cross-view soft cluster assignments and global cluster centroids. As the imputation progresses, the portion of complete data increases, contributing to enhancing the discriminative information contained in global pseudo-labels. Meanwhile, to alleviate the negative impact caused by inferior impute samples and the discrepancy of cluster structures, we further design an adaptive imputation strategy based on the global pseudo-label and the local cluster assignment. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing approaches.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Bridging Gaps: Federated Multi-View Clustering in Heterogeneous Hybrid Views

Xinyue Chen
Yazhou Ren
Jie Xu
Fangfei Lin
Xiaorong Pu
Yang Yang

Recently, federated multi-view clustering (FedMVC) has emerged to explore cluster structures in multi-view data distributed on multiple clients. Many existing approaches tend to assume that clients are isomorphic and all of them belong to either single-view clients or multi-view clients. While these methods have succeeded, they may encounter challenges in practical FedMVC scenarios involving heterogeneous hybrid views, where a mixture of single-view and multi-view clients exhibit varying degrees of heterogeneity. In this paper, we propose a novel FedMVC framework, which concurrently addresses two challenges associated with heterogeneous hybrid views, i. e. , client gap and view gap. To address the client gap, we design a local-synergistic contrastive learning approach that helps single-view clients and multi-view clients achieve consistency for mitigating heterogeneity among all clients. To address the view gap, we develop a global-specific weighting aggregation method, which encourages global models to learn complementary features from hybrid views. The interplay between local-synergistic contrastive learning and global-specific weighting aggregation mutually enhances the exploration of the data cluster structures distributed on multiple clients. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can handle the heterogeneous hybrid views in FedMVC and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Cross-View Contrastive Fusion for Enhanced Molecular Property Prediction

Yan Zheng
Song Wu
Junyu Lin
Yazhou Ren
Jing He
Xiaorong Pu
Lifang He

Machine learning based molecular property prediction has been a hot topic in the field of computer aided drug discovery (CADD). However, current MPP methods face two prominent challenges: 1) single-view MPP methods do not sufficiently exploit the complementary information of molecular data across multiple views, generally producing suboptimal performance, and 2) most existing multi-view MPP methods ignore the disparities in data quality among different views, inadvertently introducing the risk of models being overshadowed by inferior views. To address the above challenges, we introduce a novel cross-view contrastive fusion for enhanced molecular property prediction method (MolFuse). First, we extract intricate molecular semantics and structures from both sequence and graph views to leverage the complementarity of multi-view data. Then, MolFuse employs two distinct graphs, the atomic graph and chemical bond graph, to enhance the representation of the molecular graph, allow us to integrate both the fundamental backbone attributes and the nuanced shape characteristics. Notably, we incorporate a dual learning mechanism to refine the initial feature representations, and global features are obtained by maximizing the coherence among diverse view-specific molecular representations for the downstream task. The overall learning processes are combined into a unified optimization problem for iterative training. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our MolFuse.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Dynamic Weighted Graph Fusion for Deep Multi-View Clustering

Yazhou Ren
Jingyu Pu
Chenhang Cui
Yan Zheng
Xinyue Chen
Xiaorong Pu
Lifang He

By exploring complex graph information hidden in data from multiple views, multi-view clustering based on graph neural network significantly enhances the clustering performance and has drawn increasing attention in recent years. Although considerable progress has been made, most existing GNN based MVC models merely consider the explicit presence of graph structure in raw data and ignore that latent graphs of different views also provide specific information for the clustering task. We propose dynamic weighted graph fusion for deep multi-view clustering (DFMVC) to address this issue. Specifically, DFMVC learns embedded features via deep autoencoders and then constructs latent graphs for each individual view. Then, it concatenates the embedded features of all views to form a global feature to leverage complementary information, as well as generates a fusion graph via combining all latent graphs to accurately capture the topological information among samples. Based on the informative fusion graph and global features, the graph convolution module is adopted to derive a representation with global comprehensive information, which is further used to generate pseudo-label information. In a self-supervised manner, such information guides each view to dynamically learn discriminative features and latent graphs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of DFMVC.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Homophily-Related: Adaptive Hybrid Graph Filter for Multi-View Graph Clustering

Zichen Wen
Yawen Ling
Yazhou Ren
Tianyi Wu
Jianpeng Chen
Xiaorong Pu
Zhifeng Hao
Lifang He

Recently there is a growing focus on graph data, and multi-view graph clustering has become a popular area of research interest. Most of the existing methods are only applicable to homophilous graphs, yet the extensive real-world graph data can hardly fulfill the homophily assumption, where the connected nodes tend to belong to the same class. Several studies have pointed out that the poor performance on heterophilous graphs is actually due to the fact that conventional graph neural networks (GNNs), which are essentially low-pass filters, discard information other than the low-frequency information on the graph. Nevertheless, on certain graphs, particularly heterophilous ones, neglecting high-frequency information and focusing solely on low-frequency information impedes the learning of node representations. To break this limitation, our motivation is to perform graph filtering that is closely related to the homophily degree of the given graph, with the aim of fully leveraging both low-frequency and high-frequency signals to learn distinguishable node embedding. In this work, we propose Adaptive Hybrid Graph Filter for Multi-View Graph Clustering (AHGFC). Specifically, a graph joint process and graph joint aggregation matrix are first designed by using the intrinsic node features and adjacency relationship, which makes the low and high-frequency signals on the graph more distinguishable. Then we design an adaptive hybrid graph filter that is related to the homophily degree, which learns the node embedding based on the graph joint aggregation matrix. After that, the node embedding of each view is weighted and fused into a consensus embedding for the downstream task. Experimental results show that our proposed model performs well on six datasets containing homophilous and heterophilous graphs.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Integrating Vision-Language Semantic Graphs in Multi-View Clustering

JunLong Ke
Zichen Wen
Yechenhao Yang
Chenhang Cui
Yazhou Ren
Xiaorong Pu
Lifang He

In recent years, a variety of graph learning-based multi-view clustering (MVC) methods have emerged. However, these methods continue to face challenges in extracting latent features from real-world data, particularly in scenarios involving high-resolution color images and high-dimensional features. This task is notably difficult in cases where images are visually similar yet semantically diverse. To address this issue, we present a novel large-scale pre-trained model for multi-view clustering, named Integrate Vision-Language Semantic Graphs in Multi-View Clustering (IVSGMV), which harnesses the capabilities of visual-language pre-training models to enhance clustering performance and confronts issues in the unsupervised tuning of pre-trained models for multi-view data. We introduce an effective unsupervised approach for creating semantic graphs from image multi-view datasets using pre-trained encoders. Our method addresses the inherent spatial noise and imbalance in these encoders by employing graph filters and a joint process that integrates both image node and edge features. Additionally, we demonstrate the application of our approach to multi-view image clustering on extensive datasets, notably the high-resolution MVImgNet, achieving an impressive 82% accuracy. Furthermore, our method extends the zero-shot capabilities of large-scale pre-trained models, resulting in good performance in clustering tasks on untrained multi-view datasets.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Simple Contrastive Multi-View Clustering with Data-Level Fusion

Caixuan Luo
Jie Xu
Yazhou Ren
Junbo Ma
Xiaofeng Zhu

Previous deep multi-view clustering methods usually design un-shared encoders to explore the cluster information among multi-view data, but they are difficult to customize the encoders for individual views and easily increase information loss. To address these issues, we propose a simple yet effective contrastive multi-view clustering framework. Specifically, different from using feature-level fusion in previous methods, we first propose a data-level fusion method to fuse multi-view information, which produces a fused data to replace all views and thus avoids customizing networks for different views. Then, we simulate the data noise and unavailability in multiple views to design two kinds of data augmentation for the fused data, making a shared encoder with simple contrastive learning to learn robust features and achieve the interaction across views. As a result, our method is a general framework and we base on it to conduct feature clustering and end-to-end clustering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can explore the discriminative information in multi-view data and achieve superior clustering performance.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Sparse Bayesian Deep Learning for Cross Domain Medical Image Reconstruction

Jiaxin Huang
Qi Wu
Yazhou Ren
Fan Yang
Aodi Yang
Qianqian Yang
Xiaorong Pu

Cross domain medical image reconstruction aims to address the issue that deep learning models trained solely on one source dataset might not generalize effectively to unseen target datasets from different hospitals. Some recent methods achieve satisfactory reconstruction performance, but often at the expense of extensive parameters and time consumption. To strike a balance between cross domain image reconstruction quality and model computational efficiency, we propose a lightweight sparse Bayesian deep learning method. Notably, we apply a fixed-form variational Bayes (FFVB) approach to quantify pixel-wise uncertainty priors derived from degradation distribution of the source domain. Furthermore, by integrating the uncertainty prior into the posterior sampled through stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD), we develop a training strategy that dynamically generates and optimizes the prior distribution on the network weights for each unseen domain. This strategy enhances generalizability and ensures robust reconstruction performance. When evaluated on medical image reconstruction tasks, our proposed approach demonstrates impressive performance across various previously unseen domains.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A Novel Approach for Effective Multi-View Clustering with Information-Theoretic Perspective

Chenhang Cui
Yazhou Ren
Jingyu Pu
Jiawei Li
Xiaorong Pu
Tianyi Wu
Yutao Shi
Lifang He

Multi-view clustering (MVC) is a popular technique for improving clustering performance using various data sources. However, existing methods primarily focus on acquiring consistent information while often neglecting the issue of redundancy across multiple views. This study presents a new approach called Sufficient Multi-View Clustering (SUMVC) that examines the multi-view clustering framework from an information-theoretic standpoint. Our proposed method consists of two parts. Firstly, we develop a simple and reliable multi-view clustering method SCMVC (simple consistent multi-view clustering) that employs variational analysis to generate consistent information. Secondly, we propose a sufficient representation lower bound to enhance consistent information and minimise unnecessary information among views. The proposed SUMVC method offers a promising solution to the problem of multi-view clustering and provides a new perspective for analyzing multi-view data. To verify the effectiveness of our model, we conducted a theoretical analysis based on the Bayes Error Rate, and experiments on multiple multi-view datasets demonstrate the superior performance of SUMVC.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Deep Multi-view Subspace Clustering with Anchor Graph

Chenhang Cui
Yazhou Ren
Jingyu Pu
Xiaorong Pu
Lifang He

Deep multi-view subspace clustering (DMVSC) has recently attracted increasing attention due to its promising performance. However, existing DMVSC methods still have two issues: (1) they mainly focus on using autoencoders to nonlinearly embed the data, while the embedding may be suboptimal for clustering because the clustering objective is rarely considered in autoencoders, and (2) existing methods typically have a quadratic or even cubic complexity, which makes it challenging to deal with large-scale data. To address these issues, in this paper we propose a novel deep multi-view subspace clustering method with anchor graph (DMCAG). To be specific, DMCAG firstly learns the embedded features for each view independently, which are used to obtain the subspace representations. To significantly reduce the complexity, we construct an anchor graph with small size for each view. Then, spectral clustering is performed on an integrated anchor graph to obtain pseudo-labels. To overcome the negative impact caused by suboptimal embedded features, we use pseudo-labels to refine the embedding process to make it more suitable for the clustering task. Pseudo-labels and embedded features are updated alternately. Furthermore, we design a strategy to keep the consistency of the labels based on contrastive learning to enhance the clustering performance. Empirical studies on real-world datasets show that our method achieves superior clustering performance over other state-of-the-art methods.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Dual Label-Guided Graph Refinement for Multi-View Graph Clustering

Yawen Ling
Jianpeng Chen
Yazhou Ren
Xiaorong Pu
Jie Xu
Xiaofeng Zhu
Lifang He

With the increase of multi-view graph data, multi-view graph clustering (MVGC) that can discover the hidden clusters without label supervision has attracted growing attention from researchers. Existing MVGC methods are often sensitive to the given graphs, especially influenced by the low quality graphs, i.e., they tend to be limited by the homophily assumption. However, the widespread real-world data hardly satisfy the homophily assumption. This gap limits the performance of existing MVGC methods on low homophilous graphs. To mitigate this limitation, our motivation is to extract high-level view-common information which is used to refine each view's graph, and reduce the influence of non-homophilous edges. To this end, we propose dual label-guided graph refinement for multi-view graph clustering (DuaLGR), to alleviate the vulnerability in facing low homophilous graphs. Specifically, DuaLGR consists of two modules named dual label-guided graph refinement module and graph encoder module. The first module is designed to extract the soft label from node features and graphs, and then learn a refinement matrix. In cooperation with the pseudo label from the second module, these graphs are refined and aggregated adaptively with different orders. Subsequently, a consensus graph can be generated in the guidance of the pseudo label. Finally, the graph encoder module encodes the consensus graph along with node features to produce the high-level pseudo label for iteratively clustering. The experimental results show the superior performance on coping with low homophilous graph data. The source code for DuaLGR is available at https://github.com/YwL-zhufeng/DuaLGR.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Self-Supervised Graph Attention Networks for Deep Weighted Multi-View Clustering

Zongmo Huang
Yazhou Ren
Xiaorong Pu
Shudong Huang
Zenglin Xu
Lifang He

As one of the most important research topics in the unsupervised learning field, Multi-View Clustering (MVC) has been widely studied in the past decade and numerous MVC methods have been developed. Among these methods, the recently emerged Graph Neural Networks (GNN) shine a light on modeling both topological structure and node attributes in the form of graphs, to guide unified embedding learning and clustering. However, the effectiveness of existing GNN-based MVC methods is still limited due to the insufficient consideration in utilizing the self-supervised information and graph information, which can be reflected from the following two aspects: 1) most of these models merely use the self-supervised information to guide the feature learning and fail to realize that such information can be also applied in graph learning and sample weighting; 2) the usage of graph information is generally limited to the feature aggregation in these models, yet it also provides valuable evidence in detecting noisy samples. To this end, in this paper we propose Self-Supervised Graph Attention Networks for Deep Weighted Multi-View Clustering (SGDMC), which promotes the performance of GNN-based deep MVC models by making full use of the self-supervised information and graph information. Specifically, a novel attention-allocating approach that considers both the similarity of node attributes and the self-supervised information is developed to comprehensively evaluate the relevance among different nodes. Meanwhile, to alleviate the negative impact caused by noisy samples and the discrepancy of cluster structures, we further design a sample-weighting strategy based on the attention graph as well as the discrepancy between the global pseudo-labels and the local cluster assignment. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing approaches.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Self-Weighted Contrastive Learning among Multiple Views for Mitigating Representation Degeneration

Jie Xu
Shuo Chen
Yazhou Ren
Xiaoshuang Shi
Hengtao Shen
Gang Niu
Xiaofeng Zhu

Recently, numerous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of contrastive learning (CL), which learns feature representations by pulling in positive samples while pushing away negative samples. Many successes of CL lie in that there exists semantic consistency between data augmentations of the same instance. In multi-view scenarios, however, CL might cause representation degeneration when the collected multiple views inherently have inconsistent semantic information or their representations subsequently do not capture sufficient discriminative information. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework called SEM: SElf-weighted Multi-view contrastive learning with reconstruction regularization. Specifically, SEM is a general framework where we propose to first measure the discrepancy between pairwise representations and then minimize the corresponding self-weighted contrastive loss, and thus making SEM adaptively strengthen the useful pairwise views and also weaken the unreliable pairwise views. Meanwhile, we impose a self-supervised reconstruction term to regularize the hidden features of encoders, to assist CL in accessing sufficient discriminative information of data. Experiments on public multi-view datasets verified that SEM can mitigate representation degeneration in existing CL methods and help them achieve significant performance improvements. Ablation studies also demonstrated the effectiveness of SEM with different options of weighting strategies and reconstruction terms.

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IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Contrastive Multi-view Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering

Fangfei Lin
Bing Bai
Kun Bai
Yazhou Ren
Peng Zhao
Zenglin Xu

Hierarchical clustering recursively partitions data at an increasingly finer granularity. In real-world applications, multi-view data have become increasingly important. This raises a less investigated problem, i. e. , multi-view hierarchical clustering, to better understand the hierarchical structure of multi-view data. To this end, we propose a novel neural network-based model, namely Contrastive Multi-view Hyperbolic Hierarchical Clustering(CMHHC). It consists of three components, i. e. , multi-view alignment learning, aligned feature similarity learning, and continuous hyperbolic hierarchical clustering. First, we align sample-level representations across multiple views in a contrastive way to capture the view-invariance information. Next, we utilize both the manifold and Euclidean similarities to improve the metric property. Then, we embed the representations into a hyperbolic space and optimize the hyperbolic embeddings via a continuous relaxation of hierarchical clustering loss. Finally, a binary clustering tree is decoded from optimized hyperbolic embeddings. Experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its components.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Deep Incomplete Multi-View Clustering via Mining Cluster Complementarity

Jie Xu
Chao Li
Yazhou Ren
Liang Peng
Yujie Mo
Xiaoshuang Shi
Xiaofeng Zhu

Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) is an important unsupervised approach to group the multi-view data containing missing data in some views. Previous IMVC methods suffer from the following issues: (1) the inaccurate imputation or padding for missing data negatively affects the clustering performance, (2) the quality of features after fusion might be interfered by the low-quality views, especially the inaccurate imputed views. To avoid these issues, this work presents an imputation-free and fusion-free deep IMVC framework. First, the proposed method builds a deep embedding feature learning and clustering model for each view individually. Our method then nonlinearly maps the embedding features of complete data into a high-dimensional space to discover linear separability. Concretely, this paper provides an implementation of the high-dimensional mapping as well as shows the mechanism to mine the multi-view cluster complementarity. This complementary information is then transformed to the supervised information with high confidence, aiming to achieve the multi-view clustering consistency for the complete data and incomplete data. Furthermore, we design an EM-like optimization strategy to alternately promote feature learning and clustering. Extensive experiments on real-world multi-view datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior clustering performance over state-of-the-art methods.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Multi-view Subspace Clustering on Topological Manifold

Shudong Huang
Hongjie Wu
Yazhou Ren
Ivor Tsang
Zenglin Xu
Wentao Feng
Jiancheng Lv

Multi-view subspace clustering aims to exploit a common affinity representation by means of self-expression. Plenty of works have been presented to boost the clustering performance, yet seldom considering the topological structure in data, which is crucial for clustering data on manifold. Orthogonal to existing works, in this paper, we argue that it is beneficial to explore the implied data manifold by learning the topological relationship between data points. Our model seamlessly integrates multiple affinity graphs into a consensus one with the topological relevance considered. Meanwhile, we manipulate the consensus graph by a connectivity constraint such that the connected components precisely indicate different clusters. Hence our model is able to directly obtain the final clustering result without reliance on any label discretization strategy as previous methods do. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, compared to the state-of-the-art competitors over the clustering performance.

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AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Ranking-Based Deep Cross-Modal Hashing

Xuanwu Liu
Guoxian Yu
Carlotta Domeniconi
Jun Wang
Yazhou Ren
Maozu Guo

Cross-modal hashing has been receiving increasing interests for its low storage cost and fast query speed in multi-modal data retrievals. However, most existing hashing methods are based on hand-crafted or raw level features of objects, which may not be optimally compatible with the coding process. Besides, these hashing methods are mainly designed to handle simple pairwise similarity. The complex multilevel ranking semantic structure of instances associated with multiple labels has not been well explored yet. In this paper, we propose a ranking-based deep cross-modal hashing approach (RDCMH). RDCMH firstly uses the feature and label information of data to derive a semi-supervised semantic ranking list. Next, to expand the semantic representation power of hand-crafted features, RDCMH integrates the semantic ranking information into deep cross-modal hashing and jointly optimizes the compatible parameters of deep feature representations and of hashing functions. Experiments on real multi-modal datasets show that RDCMH outperforms other competitive baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in cross-modal retrieval applications.

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IJCAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Robust Softmax Regression for Multi-class Classification with Self-Paced Learning

Yazhou Ren
Peng Zhao
Yongpan Sheng
Dezhong Yao
Zenglin Xu

Softmax regression, a generalization of Logistic regression (LR) in the setting of multi-class classification, has been widely used in many machine learning applications. However, the performance of softmax regression is extremely sensitive to the presence of noisy data and outliers. To address this issue, we propose a model of robust softmax regression (RoSR) originated from the self-paced learning (SPL) paradigm for multi-class classification. Concretely, RoSR equipped with the soft weighting scheme is able to evaluate the importance of each data instance. Then, data instances participate in the classification problem according to their weights. In this way, the influence of noisy data and outliers (which are typically with small weights) can be significantly reduced. However, standard SPL may suffer from the imbalanced class influence problem, where some classes may have little influence in the training process if their instances are not sensitive to the loss. To alleviate this problem, we design two novel soft weighting schemes that assign weights and select instances locally for each class. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

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