Progressive Deep Multi-View Comprehensive Representation Learning

Multi-view Comprehensive Representation Learning (MCRL) aims to synthesize information from multiple views to learn comprehensive representations of data items. Prevalent deep MCRL methods typically concatenate synergistic view-specific representations or average aligned view-specific representations in the fusion stage. However, the performance of synergistic fusion methods inevitably degenerate or even fail when partial views are missing in real-world applications; the aligned based fusion methods usually cannot fully exploit the complementarity of multi-view data. To eliminate all these drawbacks, in this work we present a Progressive Deep Multi-view Fusion (PDMF) method. Considering the multi-view comprehensive representation should contain complete information and the view-specific data contain partial information, we deem that it is unstable to directly learn the mapping from partial information to complete information. Hence, PDMF employs a progressive learning strategy, which contains the pre-training and fine-tuning stages. In the pre-training stage, PDMF decodes the auxiliary comprehensive representation to the view-specific data. It also captures the consistency and complementarity by learning the relations between the dimensions of the auxiliary comprehensive representation and all views. In the fine-tuning stage, PDMF learns the mapping from the original data to the comprehensive representation with the help of the auxiliary comprehensive representation and relations. Experiments conducted on a synthetic toy dataset and 4 real-world datasets show that PDMF outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods. The code is released at https://github.com/winterant/PDMF.