Multi-View Clustering with Granularity-Aware Pseudo Supervision

Abstract Modern multi-view clustering (MVC) is dominated by two paradigms: multi-view fusion and pseudo-label-guided learning. Pseudo-labeling methods can suffer from confirmation bias; their reliance on a fixed-granularity supervision from an initial clustering can cause learned embeddings to drift from the data's true structure and lose discriminative power. Conversely, fusion methods excel at integrating information but often struggle to robustly differentiate between high-quality and noisy views, which can obscure final cluster boundaries and degrade performance. To address these complementary challenges, we propose GAPS (Granularity-Aware Pseudo Supervision), a novel MVC framework. GAPS introduces a granularity-aware supervision mechanism that generates a full hierarchy of pseudo-labels, enabling the selection of a supervision level that best aligns with the data's intrinsic multi-scale structure. Furthermore, to ensure a high-quality supervisory signal, it incorporates a reliability-aware view selection strategy using a novel Separation-Compactness Index (SCI) to identify and leverage the most informative view for pseudo-label generation. This dual approach ensures the supervisory signal is both structurally adaptive and derived from the most reliable source, leading to highly effective final representations. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of GAPS over other competitors.