Plug-and-Play Incomplete Multi-View Clustering via Janus-Faced Affinity Learning with Topology Harmonization

Prevailing incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) approaches typically fail to account for the interference of view-exclusive artifacts when learning view-consensus representations, which could compromise the fidelity of the resulting similarity measure. Moreover, inconsistencies in anchor order across views may distort the graph structure, impairing the clustering performance. The reliance on carefully-tuned regularization hyper-parameters also usually undermines the model's practical utility. To alleviate these issues, we propose a plug-and-play IMVC framework named PJFTH that incorporates Janus-faced affinity learning with topology harmonization. It explicitly models the exclusive-to-consensus interplay, derives a view-private graph from each view, and adaptively integrates them into a global consensus affinity according to the respective view's intrinsic characteristics. Furthermore, a permutation transformation with unary encoding constraints is applied to anchor matrix, realigning anchor topology while preserving the values. This process synchronizes anchor order prior to similarity integration and maintains original anchor properties. Notably, all components are coupled seamlessly and optimized in a joint manner. Also, the provable overall linear complexity further enlarges its scalability and practicality. Experimental results confirm that PJFTH receives competitive performance compared to several leading methods.