Geometry-Aware Variational Information Maximization for Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering

Abstract Incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC) aims to group data into meaningful clusters when each sample is only partially observed across multiple views. Most existing methods either rely on imputation strategies that may introduce noise and distort the underlying data distribution, or adopt cross-view alignment techniques that focus on pairwise relationships, often resulting in suboptimal representations and unstable clustering performance. In this paper, we propose Geometry-Aware Variational Information Maximization for Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering (GAVIM), a novel imputation-free variational framework that enables robust and coherent incomplete multi-view clustering. Specifically, GAVIM leverages mutual information maximization to preserve the high mutual information between the available multi-view data and the shared embedding. Moreover, we explicitly retain local geometric consistency within each view-specific latent space under the guidance of an adaptive global supervision signal. Lastly, GAVIM aligns all views simultaneously using a Gramian representation alignment measure, ensuring coherent structure across modalities and promoting unified, semantically meaningful representations. Extensive experiments on five benchmark IMVC datasets with varying levels of view incompleteness demonstrate that GAVIM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clustering accuracy and representation quality.