Learn from View Correlation: An Anchor Enhancement Strategy for Multi-view Clustering

In recent years, anchor-based methods have achieved promising progress in multi-view clustering. The performances of these methods are significantly affected by the quality of the anchors. However, the anchors generated by previous works solely rely on single-view information, ignoring the correlation among different views. In particular, we observe that similar patterns are more likely to exist between similar views so such correlation information can be leveraged to enhance the quality of the anchors, which is also omitted. To this end, we propose a novel plug-and-play anchor enhancement strategy through view correlation for multi-view clustering. Specifically, we construct a view graph based on aligned initial anchor graphs to explore inter-view correlations. By learning from view correlation, we enhance the anchors of the current view using the relationships between anchors and samples on neighboring views, thereby narrowing the spatial distribution of anchors on similar views. Experimental results on seven datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over other existing methods. Furthermore, extensive comparative experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed anchor enhancement module when applied to various anchor-based methods.