Deep Adversarial Inconsistent Cognitive Sampling for Multiview Progressive Subspace Clustering

Deep multiview clustering methods have achieved remarkable performance. However, all of them failed to consider the difficulty labels (uncertainty of ground truth for training samples) over multiview samples, which may result in a nonideal clustering network for getting stuck into poor local optima during the training process; worse still, the difficulty labels from the multiview samples are always inconsistent, and such a fact makes it even more challenging to handle. In this article, we propose a novel deep adversarial inconsistent cognitive sampling (DAICS) method for multiview progressive subspace clustering. A multiview binary classification (easy or difficult) loss and a feature similarity loss are proposed to jointly learn a binary classifier and a deep consistent feature embedding network, throughout an adversarial minimax game over difficulty labels of multiview consistent samples. We develop a multiview cognitive sampling strategy to select the input samples from easy to difficult for multiview clustering network training. However, the distributions of easy and difficult samples are mixed together, hence not trivial to achieve the goal. To resolve it, we define a sampling probability with a theoretical guarantee. Based on that, a golden section mechanism is further designed to generate a sample set boundary to progressively select the samples with varied difficulty labels via a gate unit, which is utilized to jointly learn a multiview common progressive subspace and clustering network for more efficient clustering. Experimental results on four real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of DAICS over state-of-the-art methods.