Towards Multi-view Consistent Graph Diffusion

Facing the increasing heterogeneity of data in the real world, multi-view learning has become a crucial area of research. Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are powerful for modeling both graph structures and features, making them a focal point in multi-view learning research. However, these methods typically only account for static data dependencies within each view separately when constructing the topology necessary for GCNs, overlooking potential relationships across views in multi-view data. Furthermore, there is a notable absence of theoretical guidance for constructing multi-view data topologies, leading to uncertainty regarding the progression of graph embeddings toward a consistent state. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a framework named energy-constrained multi-view graph diffusion. This approach establishes a mathematical correspondence between multi-view data and GCNs via graph diffusion. It treats multi-view data as a unified entity and devises a feature propagation process with inter-view awareness by considering both inter-view and intra-view feature flow across the entire system. Additionally, an energy function is introduced to guide the inter- and intra-view diffusion, ensuring that the representations converge towards global consistency. The empirical research on several benchmark datasets substantiates the benefits of the proposed method.