Differentiable Information Bottleneck for Deterministic Multi-view Clustering

In recent several years, the information bottleneck (IB) principle provides an information-theoretic framework for deep multi-view clustering (MVC) by compressing multi-view observations while preserving the relevant information of multiple views. Although existing IB-based deep MVC methods have achieved huge success, they rely on variational approximation and distribution assumption to estimate the lower bound of mutual information, which is a notoriously hard and impractical problem in high-dimensional multi-view spaces. In this work, we propose a new differentiable information bottleneck (DIB) method, which provides a deterministic and analytical MVC solution by fitting the mutual information without the necessity of variational approximation. Specifically, we first propose to directly fit the mutual information of high-dimensional spaces by leveraging normalized kernel Gram matrix, which does not require any auxiliary neural estimator to estimate the lower bound of mutual information. Then, based on the new mutual information measurement, a deterministic multi-view neural network with analytical gradients is explicitly trained to parameterize IB principle, which derives a deterministic compression of input variables from different views. Finally, a triplet consistency discovery mechanism is devised, which is capable of mining the feature consistency, cluster consistency and joint consistency based on the deterministic and compact representations. Extensive experimental results show the superiority of our DIB method on 6 benchmarks compared with 13 state-of-the-art baselines.