THCRL: Trusted Hierarchical Contrastive Representation Learning for Multi-View Clustering

Multi-View Clustering (MVC) has garnered increasing attention in recent years. It is capable of partitioning data samples into distinct groups by learning a consensus representation. However, a significant challenge remains: the problem of untrustworthy fusion. This problem primarily arises from two key factors: 1) Existing methods often ignore the presence of inherent noise within individual views; 2) In traditional MVC methods using Contrastive Learning (CL), similarity computations typically rely on different views of the same instance, while neglecting the structural information from nearest neighbors within the same cluster. Consequently, this leads to the wrong direction for multi-view fusion. To address this problem, we present a novel Trusted Hierarchical Contrastive Representation Learning (THCRL). It consists of two key modules. Specifically, we propose the Deep Symmetry Hierarchical Fusion (DSHF) module, which leverages the UNet architecture integrated with multiple denoising mechanisms to achieve trustworthy fusion of multi-view data. Furthermore, we present the Average K-Nearest Neighbors Contrastive Learning (AKCL) module to align the fused representation with the view-specific representation. Unlike conventional strategies, AKCL enhances representation similarity among samples belonging to the same cluster, rather than merely focusing on the same sample across views, thereby reinforcing the confidence of the fused representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that THCRL achieves the state-of-the-art performance in deep MVC tasks.