SCAE: Structural Contrastive Auto-Encoder for Incomplete Multi-View Representation Learning

Describing an object from multiple perspectives often leads to incomplete data representation. Consequently, learning consistent representations for missing data from multiple views has emerged as a key focus in the realm of Incomplete Multi-view Representation Learning (IMRL). In recent years, various strategies, such as subspace learning, matrix decomposition, and deep learning, have been harnessed to develop numerous IMRL methods. In this article, our primary research revolves around IMRL, with a particular emphasis on addressing two main challenges. Firstly, we delve into the effective integration of intra-view similarity and contextual structure into a unified framework. Secondly, we explore the effective facilitation of information exchange and fusion across multiple views. To tackle these issues, we propose a deep learning approach known as Structural Contrastive Auto-Encoder (SCAE) to solve the challenges of IMRL. SCAE comprises two major components: intra-view structural representation learning and inter-view contrastive representation learning. The former involves capturing intra-view similarity by minimizing the Dirichlet energy of the feature matrix, while also applying spatial dispersion regularization to capture intra-view contextual structure. The latter encourages maximizing the mutual information of inter-view representations, facilitating information exchange and fusion across views. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in significantly enhancing model accuracy and robustly addressing IMRL problems. The code is available at https://github.com/limengran98/SCAE.