Self-supervised Trusted Contrastive Multi-view Clustering with Uncertainty Refined

Multi-view clustering (MVC), especially contrastive MVC, has demonstrated promising potential in many fields and practical scenarios. However, existing contrastive MVC methods still ignore the reliability of clustering results and the impact of false negative pairs, which limits the application of methods in critical security areas. To solve the above challenges, we propose a Self-supervised Trusted Contrastive Multi-view Clustering with Uncertainty Refined (STCMC-UR) method, which integrates clustering results and uncertainty learning to guide the self-supervised contrastive learning (CL). First, the belief of a specific view is generated in the evidence generation module. Afterwards, the belief mass and uncertainty of each view are learned using the Dirichlet distribution and we fuse multiple views with the Dempster-Shafer theory to generate the final clustering result and the uncertainty of the view. Then, the view weight is further quantified to adjust the belief of each view. Different from existing methods, with the clustering result and uncertainty generated by the fusion, we design a feature-level uncertainty-refined self-supervised CL module, where the pseudo-label is selectively employed in each iteration to conduct more accurate CL. As a result, the modules are mutually beneficial, which is conducive to more effective feature learning and clustering structure discovery, and more accurate learning results are obtained. Extensive experiments on five datasets show that the proposed method has significant improvements in effectiveness compared with the latest methods.