REVIEW 3 major objections 5 minor 33 references
Trusted Mamba Contrastive Network for Multi-View Clustering
T0 review · 3 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-11 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Multi-view clustering becomes trustworthy when fusion is selective and contrastive learning follows clusters rather than instances; the paper reports 98.53% ACC on Cifar100, about 32 points above the best baseline.
desk verdict A promising Mamba-based multi-view clustering architecture, but the central SOTA claim currently rests on a likely invalid loss equation and single-run numbers that need verification. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing machinery is the pair (TMFN, AsCL). TMFN (Trusted Mamba Fusion Network) turns each view embedding into a sequence of tokens, concatenates the view sequences into one global sequence, and feeds it to a selective state-space model in which the matrices $B$ and $C$ depend on the input (Eq. 8), so the hidden state acts as a learned gate that filters which view information passes through; a second branch applies a gated nonlinearity, and the two are multiplied elementwise (Eq. 9) before conversion back to a fused vector. AsCL (Average-similarity Contrastive Learning) computes $S_{ij}$ as the average cosine similarity between the $i$-th and $j$-th samples over all view embeddings (Eq. 12), then uses $(1-S_{ij})$ as a weight on every negative term of the contrastive denominator (Eq. 16), so samples that look similar across views are not pushed apart. This replaces instance-level positives with cluster-level similarity as the unit of alignment.
What would settle it
Run the released code on Cifar100 and check whether ACC reproduces 98.53%; then, in the same setting, replace $S_{ij}$ with random weights in Eq. (16). If accuracy stays near 98%, the AsCL weighting is not driving the result; if accuracy collapses, the cross-view similarity proxy is load-bearing.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that the 'untrusted fusion' problem in deep multi-view clustering has two identifiable causes — noisy or redundant view information and contrastive alignment that treats only the same sample as positive — and that both are fixable in one network. TMFN segments each view-specific embedding into a token sequence, concatenates the views, and runs them through a Mamba-style selective state-space model that gates information based on the input, suppressing irrelevant view content before converting back to a fused vector. AsCL then aligns the fused representation with each view-specific representation under a contrastive loss whose denominator reweights each other sample by $(1-S_{ij})$, where $S_{ij}$ is the mean cosine similarity of view embeddings across views; samples judged to be in the same cluster are down-weighted as negatives. The result, the paper reports, is a fused representation on which k-means achieves 0.9756 ACC on Hdigit, 0.9853 on Cifar100, 0.6715 on Prokaryotic, and 0.5691 on Wiki, beating all compared deep multi-view clustering methods.
Load-bearing premise
The load-bearing premise is that the average cosine similarity $S_{ij}$ of view-specific embeddings correctly indicates whether samples $i$ and $j$ belong to the same cluster; if this proxy is wrong, AsCL will amplify the wrong pairings and the reported accuracy gains could disappear.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- If the reported Cifar100 result is reproducible — 98.53% ACC against CoMVC's 65.69% — then previous contrastive multi-view clustering methods were not merely slightly suboptimal but were actively misaligning representations, and cluster-aware weighting should become a standard component.
- Ablations across the four datasets show that removing TMFN costs 3.24–9.44 ACC points and removing AsCL costs 2.13–9.92 ACC points, so the two modules contribute complementary gains rather than one doing all the work.
- Because AsCL uses only the cross-view average cosine similarity and the contrastive loss, it requires no labels and no cluster-count supervision during training, so the method applies to any multi-view dataset with arbitrary per-view feature dimensions.
- The reported margins imply that the reconstruction loss alone is not enough to produce clustering-friendly fused representations; the selective gate and cluster-aware contrastive term carry most of the benefit.
Reading between the lines
- A testable extension the paper leaves implicit is to make $S_{ij}$ iterative: re-estimate the similarity matrix from the fused representation as training proceeds. If AsCL's benefit really comes from cluster-aware weighting, an updated $S_{ij}$ should maintain or improve accuracy; if the fixed proxy is what matters, iterative refinement should make little difference.
- The roughly 32-point gain on Cifar100 is far outside typical incremental improvements in multi-view clustering. If it replicates independently, it would suggest that instance-level contrastive objectives were doing active harm in deep multi-view clustering, and that cluster-weighted contrastive losses could transfer to other self-supervised representation learning problems.
- TMFN's input-dependent gate is a natural candidate for handling missing or corrupted views, since the selective state-space model can in principle learn to suppress uninformative view tokens; the paper only evaluates complete views, so this remains an untested property of the architecture.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The manuscript proposes TMCN, a deep multi-view clustering method combining autoencoder reconstruction, a 'Trusted Mamba Fusion Network' (TMFN) based on selective state-space models, and an 'Average-similarity Contrastive Learning' (AsCL) module that re-weights contrastive pairs using average cross-view cosine similarity. The authors claim state-of-the-art ACC/NMI/PUR on Hdigit, Cifar100, Prokaryotic, and Wiki, and report ablations showing both TMFN and AsCL provide large gains. The paper also includes convergence, parameter sensitivity, and t-SNE visualizations.
Significance. If validated, the use of Mamba-style selective gating for multi-view fusion and the shift from instance-level to cluster-level contrastive alignment would be a useful contribution to deep multi-view clustering. The paper promises code and provides a clear framework diagram. However, the AsCL loss appears mathematically ill-posed, the empirical state-of-the-art claim rests on single-run numbers without error bars, and at least one ablation configuration is under-specified. These issues are load-bearing, so the contribution cannot be accepted in its current form.
major comments (3)
- [Section II-C, Eq. (16)] The AsCL loss is not well defined as written. Since S_ii=1 for every view, the j=i term in the denominator is e^{(1-S_ii)C(...)/τ}=e^0=1; removing that positive pair would require subtracting 1, not e^{1/τ}. For τ<1, e^{1/τ} is large and can exceed the denominator sum, making the argument of the log negative and the loss undefined. The sentence after Eq. (16) additionally misstates the dependence: C is not increased by decreased S_ij; only the exponent weight (1-S_ij) changes. Because Table III credits AsCL with substantial ablation gains (e.g., 9.92 ACC on Hdigit and 2.71 on Cifar100), the SOTA claim depends on this formula. Please correct the equation or clarify if the implementation uses a different loss, and re-verify the ablation results.
- [Section III-B, Table II] The comparative results are reported as single values with no standard deviations, repeated runs, or seeds. On Cifar100 the reported TMCN ACC of 0.9853 versus CoMVC's 0.6569 is a 32-point margin, and the MFLVC result of 0.1342 ACC with NMI 0.0070 is far below the behavior reported in the original MFLVC paper. These numbers need to be reconciled with the evaluation protocol. Please provide mean±std over multiple runs, a description of how the deep features are obtained for each dataset, and the exact training protocol.
- [Section III-C, Table III and Section II-B] The 'No-TMFN' ablation is under-specified. The text says the fused representation Z is the concatenation of all view-specific representations, but Section II-B Eq. (5) already concatenates sequence vectors before the Mamba network. It is unclear whether the baseline operates on the final one-dimensional embeddings z_i^m or on the sequence-level concatenation, and whether all other components are kept identical. Without this clarification, the ablation cannot isolate the contribution of the selective mechanism.
minor comments (5)
- [Section II-B, Eqs. (4)-(10)] The operations rea1, rea2, rea3, and rea4 are not defined in the text or figure; please define the segmentation/reshape operation explicitly.
- [Section II-D, Eq. (18)] The clustering objective is written as min_{U,V} ||H - UV||_2^2 with constraints U1=1, U≥0 and called k-means, but this is not the standard k-means objective; please clarify the relationship or present the k-means update used.
- [Figure 2] The caption says 'convergence analysis and visualization analysis,' but only one set of curves is clearly described; please label which panel is the t-SNE visualization and which is the convergence curve.
- [Section III-B] The sentence 'Five state-of-the-art clustering methods' is followed by a list of five methods; the capitalization of 'Five' and the colon usage should be fixed.
- [Reference [25]] The page range for [25] is typeset as 'pp. 162:21 090–21 110,' which is malformed; please correct it.
Circularity Check
No circularity: the empirical SOTA claims are benchmark results, and the self-citations are background only.
full rationale
The paper's central claims are empirical: TMCN is benchmarked against five external deep multi-view clustering methods on four public datasets, and the reported ACC/NMI/PUR gains are measured, not derived from the proposed equations. The reconstruction loss (Eq. 3), TMFN selective SSM (Eqs. 4-10), and AsCL contrastive loss (Eq. 16) are defined independently of the ground-truth cluster labels; k-means (Eq. 18) is applied after the fused representation is learned. No parameter is fitted to a held-out subset of the evaluation metric and then reported as a prediction of that same metric. The self-citations (e.g., [4], [12]-[15], [17]) appear in the introduction as background on multi-view learning and hashing and are not load-bearing for the correctness or uniqueness of TMFN/AsCL. AsCL does reuse the same view-specific embeddings to form both the similarity matrix S_ij and the contrastive objective, but that is a training-signal bootstrap, not a logical reduction of the reported clustering accuracy to a fitted quantity. The apparent mathematical issue in Eq. (16) - the subtraction of e^(1/tau) in the denominator potentially making the logarithm argument non-positive - is a correctness concern, not circularity, because it does not make the result equivalent to its inputs. Thus no circular step is identified.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (5)
- lambda (loss weight)
- tau (temperature)
- d (sequence vector dimension)
- alpha (expansion coefficient)
- encoder/decoder/MLP hyperparameters
assumptions (4)
- standard math The Mamba selective state-space discretization and gating equations, taken from [27], correctly model sequential feature filtering when applied to concatenated view-token sequences.
- domain assumption The average cosine similarity S_ij over all views is a reliable proxy for cluster membership of samples i and j.
- domain assumption The Mamba selection mechanism can filter noise and redundancy in multi-view features, enabling trusted fusion.
- domain assumption Different views of the same sample can belong to different clusters, which motivates aligning representations by cluster rather than by instance.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Trusted Mamba Contrastive Network for Multi-View Clustering." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/KOBDU2OL
@misc{pith2026241216487,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Trusted Mamba Contrastive Network for Multi-View Clustering},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/KOBDU2OL}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2412.16487}
}
read the original abstract
Multi-view clustering can partition data samples into their categories by learning a consensus representation in an unsupervised way and has received more and more attention in recent years. However, there is an untrusted fusion problem. The reasons for this problem are as follows: 1) The current methods ignore the presence of noise or redundant information in the view; 2) The similarity of contrastive learning comes from the same sample rather than the same cluster in deep multi-view clustering. It causes multi-view fusion in the wrong direction. This paper proposes a novel multi-view clustering network to address this problem, termed as Trusted Mamba Contrastive Network (TMCN). Specifically, we present a new Trusted Mamba Fusion Network (TMFN), which achieves a trusted fusion of multi-view data through a selective mechanism. Moreover, we align the fused representation and the view-specific representation using the Average-similarity Contrastive Learning (AsCL) module. AsCL increases the similarity of view presentation from the same cluster, not merely from the same sample. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in deep multi-view clustering tasks. The source code is available at https://github.com/HackerHyper/TMCN.
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Reviewed August 11, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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