On the Consistency and Large-Scale Extension of Multiple Kernel Clustering.

Existing multiple kernel clustering (MKC) algorithms have two ubiquitous problems. From the theoretical perspective, most MKC algorithms lack sufficient theoretical analysis, especially the consistency of learned parameters, such as the kernel weights. From the practical perspective, the high complexity makes MKC unable to handle large-scale datasets. This paper tries to address the above two issues. We first make a consistency analysis of an influential MKC method named Simple Multiple Kernel k-Means (SimpleMKKM). Specifically, suppose that ∧γn are the kernel weights learned by SimpleMKKM from the training samples. We also define the expected version of SimpleMKKM and denote its solution as γ*. We establish an upper bound of ||∧γn-γ*||∞ in the order of ~O(1/√n), where n is the sample number. Based on this result, we also derive its excess clustering risk calculated by a standard clustering loss function. For the large-scale extension, we replace the eigen decomposition of SimpleMKKM with singular value decomposition (SVD). Consequently, the complexity can be decreased to O(n) such that SimpleMKKM can be implemented on large-scale datasets. We then deduce several theoretical results to verify the approximation ability of the proposed SVD-based method. The results of comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/weixuan-liang/SVD-based-SimpleMKKM.

Fast Continual Multi-View Clustering With Incomplete Views.

Multi-view clustering (MVC) has attracted broad attention due to its capacity to exploit consistent and complementary information across views. This paper focuses on a challenging issue in MVC called the incomplete continual data problem (ICDP). Specifically, most existing algorithms assume that views are available in advance and overlook the scenarios where data observations of views are accumulated over time. Due to privacy considerations or memory limitations, previous views cannot be stored in these situations. Some works have proposed ways to handle this problem, but all of them fail to address incomplete views. Such an incomplete continual data problem (ICDP) in MVC is difficult to solve since incomplete information with continual data increases the difficulty of extracting consistent and complementary knowledge among views. We propose Fast Continual Multi-View Clustering with Incomplete Views (FCMVC-IV) to address this issue. Specifically, the method maintains a scalable consensus coefficient matrix and updates its knowledge with the incoming incomplete view rather than storing and recomputing all the data matrices. Considering that the given views are incomplete, the newly collected view might contain samples that have yet to appear; two indicator matrices and a rotation matrix are developed to match matrices with different dimensions. In addition, we design a three-step iterative algorithm to solve the resultant problem with linear complexity and proven convergence. Comprehensive experiments conducted on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of FCMVC-IV over the competing approaches. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/wanxinhang/FCMVC-IV.

Regulation of quantum spin conversions in a single molecular radical.

Free radicals, generally formed through the cleavage of covalent electron-pair bonds, play an important role in diverse fields ranging from synthetic chemistry to spintronics and nonlinear optics. However, the characterization and regulation of the radical state at a single-molecule level face formidable challenges. Here we present the detection and sophisticated tuning of the open-shell character of individual diradicals with a donor-acceptor structure via a sensitive single-molecule electrical approach. The radical is sandwiched between nanogapped graphene electrodes via covalent amide bonds to construct stable graphene-molecule-graphene single-molecule junctions. We measure the electrical conductance as a function of temperature and track the evolution of the closed-shell and open-shell electronic structures in real time, the open-shell triplet state being stabilized with increasing temperature. Furthermore, we tune the spin states by external stimuli, such as electrical and magnetic fields, and extract thermodynamic and kinetic parameters of the transition between closed-shell and open-shell states. Our findings provide insights into the evolution of single-molecule radicals under external stimuli, which may proof instrumental for the development of functional quantum spin-based molecular devices.

Unpaired Multi-View Graph Clustering With Cross-View Structure Matching.

Multi-view clustering (MVC), which effectively fuses information from multiple views for better performance, has received increasing attention. Most existing MVC methods assume that multi-view data are fully paired, which means that the mappings of all corresponding samples between views are predefined or given in advance. However, the data correspondence is often incomplete in real-world applications due to data corruption or sensor differences, referred to as the data-unpaired problem (DUP) in multi-view literature. Although several attempts have been made to address the DUP issue, they suffer from the following drawbacks: 1) most methods focus on the feature representation while ignoring the structural information of multi-view data, which is essential for clustering tasks; 2) existing methods for partially unpaired problems rely on pregiven cross-view alignment information, resulting in their inability to handle fully unpaired problems; and 3) their inevitable parameters degrade the efficiency and applicability of the models. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel parameter-free graph clustering framework termed unpaired multi-view graph clustering framework with cross-view structure matching (UPMGC-SM). Specifically, unlike the existing methods, UPMGC-SM effectively utilizes the structural information from each view to refine cross-view correspondences. Besides, our UPMGC-SM is a unified framework for both the fully and partially unpaired multi-view graph clustering. Moreover, existing graph clustering methods can adopt our UPMGC-SM to enhance their ability for unpaired scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed framework for both paired and unpaired datasets.

Late Fusion Multiview Clustering via Min-Max Optimization.

Multiview clustering (MVC) sufficiently exploits the diverse and complementary information among different views to improve the clustering performance. As a representative algorithm of MVC, the newly proposed simple multiple kernel k-means (SimpleMKKM) algorithm takes a min-max formulation and applies a gradient descent algorithm to decrease the resultant objective function. It is empirically observed that its superiority is attributed to the novel min-max formulation and the new optimization. In this article, we propose to integrate the min-max learning paradigm adopted by SimpleMKKM into late fusion MVC (LF-MVC). This leads to a tri-level max-min-max optimization problem with respect to the perturbation matrices, weight coefficient, and clustering partition matrix. To solve this intractable max-min-max optimization problem, we design an efficient two-step alternative optimization strategy. Furthermore, we analyze the generalization clustering performance of the proposed algorithm from the theoretical perspective. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm in terms of clustering accuracy (ACC), computation time, convergence, as well as the evolution of the learned consensus clustering matrix, clustering with different numbers of samples, and analysis of the learned kernel weight. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to significantly reduce the computation time and improve the clustering ACC when compared to several state-of-the-art LF-MVC algorithms. The code of this work is publicly released at: https://xinwangliu.github.io/Under-Review.