DFL-Net: Disentangled Feature Learning Network for Multi-View Clustering

Multi-view clustering aims at partitioning data into their underlying categories by mining shared and complementary information conveyed by different views. Although the integration of deep learning and disentanglement learning has markedly improved clustering performance, our analysis reveals two fundamental limitations in existing approaches: inadequate separation between view-shared and view-exclusive features; and the negative effects of clustering-irrelevant information on feature decoupling. To tackle these issues, we present a novel Disentangled Feature Learning Network (DFL-Net), which utilizes a progressive learning framework to systematically disentangle features. DFL-Net initially establishes view-shared representations through semantic disparity minimization, followed by the construction of orthogonal feature subspaces using cross-view and intra-view independence constraints to isolate view-specific features. Subsequently, DFL-Net enforces clustering consistency across views to adaptively eliminate irrelevant information, thus enhancing the overall effectiveness of disentanglement learning. The framework introduces two significant innovations: a comprehensive feature independence criterion that concurrently reduces intra-view and cross-view feature dependencies, and an irrelevance filtering mechanism that ensures cross-view clustering consistency. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of DFL-Net compared to state-of-the-art methods.