SCD-MVC: Stable Conditional Diffusion for Multi-view Clustering

Abstract

Multi-view clustering has garnered significant attention for its ability to integrate heterogeneous data and uncover underlying categorical structures. However, prevailing autoencoder-based methods often yield indiscriminative embeddings, rendering them prone to trivial solutions. While diffusion models have shown promise in modeling complex data distributions, their generative processes remain inherently unstable. More critically, the resulting latent representations often lack sufficient intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, leading to suboptimal clustering performance. In this paper, we propose SCD-MVC, a Stable Conditional Diffusion-driven framework for Multi-View Clustering. Specifically, it integrates conditional diffusion generation into the latent encoder to generate a target view conditioned on the remaining views, thereby facilitating robust joint distribution modeling. To align the generative process with clustering objectives, we introduce a clustering-guided semantic alignment module. This module regulates the diffusion path to enforce the learning of representations that are both view-consistent and discriminative. Furthermore, we introduce a temporal consistency regularization that enforces alignment between representations of adjacent diffusion steps. This stabilizes training and guides the optimization toward clustering-friendly representations. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCD-MVC consistently outperforms eight state-of-the-art methods, achieving performance gains ranging from 6.68% to 13.09%. The source code is available at https://github.com/Knighttt0011/SCD-MVC.