ICML 2025 论文列表

International Conference on Machine Learning

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3,342篇论文

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  • Oral
    1213.6%
  • Spotlight
    2256.7%
  • Poster
    2,99689.6%

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When can in-context learning generalize out of task distribution?

Chase Goddard, Lindsay M. Smith, Vudtiwat Ngampruetikorn, David J. Schwab

展开摘要

In-context learning (ICL) is a remarkable capability of pretrained transformers that allows models to generalize to unseen tasks after seeing only a few examples. We investigate empirically the conditions necessary on the pretraining distribution for ICL to emerge and generalize \emph{out-of-distribution}. Previous work has focused on the number of distinct tasks necessary in the pretraining dataset. Here, we use a different notion of task diversity to study the emergence of ICL in transformers trained on linear functions. We find that as task diversity increases, transformers undergo a transition from a specialized solution, which exhibits ICL only within the pretraining task distribution, to a solution which generalizes out of distribution to the entire task space. We also investigate the nature of the solutions learned by the transformer on both sides of the transition, and observe similar transitions in nonlinear regression problems. We construct a phase diagram to characterize how our concept of task diversity interacts with the number of pretraining tasks. In addition, we explore how factors such as the depth of the model and the dimensionality of the regression problem influence the transition.

Poster
Fast Incomplete Multi-view Clustering by Flexible Anchor Learning

Yalan Qin, Guorui Feng, Xinpeng Zhang

展开摘要

Multi-view clustering aims to improve the final performance by taking advantages of complementary and consistent information of all views. In real world, data samples with partially available information are common and the issue regarding the clustering for incomplete multi-view data is inevitably raised. To deal with the partial data with large scales, some fast clustering approaches for incomplete multi-view data have been presented. Despite the significant success, few of these methods pay attention to learning anchors with high quality in a unified framework for incomplete multi-view clustering, while ensuring the scalability for large-scale incomplete datasets. In addition, most existing approaches based on incomplete multi-view clustering ignore to build the relation between anchor graph and similarity matrix in symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization and then directly conduct graph partition based on the anchor graph to reduce the space and time consumption. In this paper, we propose a novel fast incomplete multi-view clustering method for the data with large scales, termed Fast Incomplete Multi-view clustering by flexible anchor Learning (FIML), where graph construction, anchor learning and graph partition are simultaneously integrated into a unified framework for fast incomplete multi-view clustering. To be specific, we learn a shared anchor graph to guarantee the consistency among multiple views and employ a adaptive weight coefficient to balance the impact for each view. The relation between anchor graph and similarity matrix in symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization can also be built, i.e., each entry in the anchor graph can characterize the similarity between the anchor and original data sample. We then adopt an alternative algorithm for solving the formulated problem. Experiments conducted on different datasets confirm the superiority of FIML compared with other clustering methods for incomplete multi-view data.

Poster
FOUNDER: Grounding Foundation Models in World Models for Open-Ended Embodied Decision Making

Yucen Wang, rui yu, Shenghua Wan, Le Gan, De-Chuan Zhan

展开摘要

Foundation Models (FMs) and World Models (WMs) offer complementary strengths in task generalization at different levels. In this work, we propose FOUNDER, a framework that integrates the generalizable knowledge embedded in FMs with the dynamic modeling capabilities of WMs to enable open-ended task solving in embodied environments in a reward-free manner. We learn a mapping function that grounds FM representations in the WM state space, effectively inferring the agent's physical states in the world simulator from external observations. This mapping enables the learning of a goal-conditioned policy through imagination during behavior learning, with the mapped task serving as the goal state. Our method leverages the predicted temporal distance to the goal state as an informative reward signal. FOUNDER demonstrates superior performance on various multi-task offline visual control benchmarks, excelling in capturing the deep-level semantics of tasks specified by text or videos, particularly in scenarios involving complex observations or domain gaps where prior methods struggle. The consistency of our learned reward function with the ground-truth reward is also empirically validated. Our project website is https://sites.google.com/view/founder-rl.

Poster
ARS: Adaptive Reward Scaling for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Myungsik Cho, Jongeui Park, Jeonghye Kim, Youngchul Sung

展开摘要

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) encounters significant challenges due to varying task complexities and their reward distributions from the environment. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose Adaptive Reward Scaling (ARS), a novel framework that dynamically adjusts reward magnitudes and leverages a periodic network reset mechanism. ARS introduces a history-based reward scaling strategy that ensures balanced reward distributions across tasks, enabling stable and efficient training. The reset mechanism complements this approach by mitigating overfitting and ensuring robust convergence. Empirical evaluations on the Meta-World benchmark demonstrate that ARS significantly outperforms baseline methods, achieving superior performance on challenging tasks while maintaining overall learning efficiency. These results validate ARS's effectiveness in tackling diverse multi-task RL problems, paving the way for scalable solutions in complex real-world applications.

Poster
Learning Compact Semantic Information for Incomplete Multi-View Missing Multi-Label Classification

Jie Wen, Yadong Liu, Zhanyan Tang, Yuting He, Yulong Chen, Mu Li, Chengliang Liu

展开摘要

Multi-view data involves various data forms, such as multi-feature, multi-sequence and multimodal data, providing rich semantic information for downstream tasks. The inherent challenge of incomplete multi-view missing multi-label learning lies in how to effectively utilize limited supervision and insufficient data to learn discriminative representation. Starting from the sufficiency of multi-view shared information for downstream tasks, we argue that the existing contrastive learning paradigms on missing multi-view data show limited consistency representation learning ability, leading to the bottleneck in extracting multi-view shared information. In response, we propose to minimize task-independent redundant information by pursuing the maximization of cross-view mutual information. Additionally, to alleviate the hindrance caused by missing labels, we develop a dual-branch soft pseudo-label cross-imputation strategy to improve classification performance. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks validate our advantages and demonstrate strong compatibility with both missing and complete data.

Poster
PROTOCOL: Partial Optimal Transport-enhanced Contrastive Learning for Imbalanced Multi-view Clustering

Xuqian Xue, Yiming Lei, Qi Cai, Hongming Shan, Junping Zhang

展开摘要

While contrastive multi-view clustering has achieved remarkable success, it implicitly assumes balanced class distribution. However, real-world multi-view data primarily exhibits class imbalance distribution. Consequently, existing methods suffer performance degradation due to their inability to perceive and model such imbalance. To address this challenge, we present the first systematic study of imbalanced multi-view clustering, focusing on two fundamental problems: *i. perceiving class imbalance distribution*, and *ii. mitigating representation degradation of minority samples*. We propose PROTOCOL, a novel PaRtial Optimal TranspOrt-enhanced COntrastive Learning framework for imbalanced multi-view clustering. First, for class imbalance perception, we map multi-view features into a consensus space and reformulate the imbalanced clustering as a partial optimal transport (POT) problem, augmented with *progressive mass constraints* and *weighted KL divergence* for class distributions. Second, we develop a POT-enhanced class-rebalanced contrastive learning at both feature and class levels, incorporating *logit adjustment* and *class-sensitive learning* to enhance minority sample representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PROTOCOL significantly improves clustering performance on imbalanced multi-view data, filling a critical research gap in this field.

Poster
SToFM: a Multi-scale Foundation Model for Spatial Transcriptomics

Suyuan Zhao, YIZHEN LUO, Ganbo Yang, Yan Zhong, Hao Zhou, Zaiqing Nie

展开摘要

Spatial Transcriptomics (ST) technologies provide biologists with rich insights into single-cell biology by preserving spatial context of cells. Building foundational models for ST can significantly enhance the analysis of vast and complex data sources, unlocking new perspectives on the intricacies of biological tissues. However, modeling ST data is inherently challenging due to the need to extract multi-scale information from tissue slices containing vast numbers of cells. This process requires integrating macro-scale tissue morphology, micro-scale cellular microenvironment, and gene-scale gene expression profile. To address this challenge, we propose **SToFM**, a multi-scale **S**patial **T**ranscript**o**mics **F**oundation **M**odel. SToFM first performs multi-scale information extraction on each ST slice, to construct a set of ST sub-slices that aggregate macro-, micro- and gene-scale information. Then an SE(2) Transformer is used to obtain high-quality cell representations from the sub-slices. Additionally, we construct **SToCorpus-88M**, the largest high-resolution spatial transcriptomics corpus for pretraining. SToFM achieves outstanding performance on a variety of downstream tasks, such as tissue region semantic segmentation and cell type annotation, demonstrating its comprehensive understanding of ST data through capturing and integrating multi-scale information.

Poster
CALM: Consensus-Aware Localized Merging for Multi-Task Learning

Kunda Yan, Min Zhang, Sen Cui, Qu Zikun, Bo Jiang, Feng Liu, Changshui Zhang

展开摘要

Model merging aims to integrate the strengths of multiple fine-tuned models into a unified model while preserving task-specific capabilities. Existing methods, represented by task arithmetic, are typically classified into global- and local-aware methods. However, global-aware methods inevitably cause parameter interference, while local-aware methods struggle to maintain the effectiveness of task-specific details in the merged model. To address these limitations, we propose a Consensus Aware Localized Merging (CALM) method which incorporates localized information aligned with global task consensus, ensuring its effectiveness post-merging. CALM consists of three key components: (1) class-balanced entropy minimization sampling, providing a more flexible and reliable way to leverage unsupervised data; (2) an efficient-aware framework, selecting a small set of tasks for sequential merging with high scalability; (3) a consensus-aware mask optimization, aligning localized binary masks with global task consensus and merging them conflict-free. Experiments demonstrate the superiority and robustness of our CALM, significantly outperforming existing methods and achieving performance close to traditional MTL.

Poster
Task-Gated Multi-Expert Collaboration Network for Degraded Multi-Modal Image Fusion

Yiming Sun, Xin Li, Pengfei Zhu, Qinghua Hu, Dongwei Ren, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu

展开摘要

Multi-modal image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from different modalities to enhance perceptual capabilities in applications such as rescue and security. However, real-world imaging often suffers from degradation issues, such as noise, blur, and haze in visible imaging, as well as stripe noise in infrared imaging, which significantly degrades model performance. To address these challenges, we propose a task-gated multi-expert collaboration network (TG-ECNet) for degraded multi-modal image fusion. The core of our model lies in the task-aware gating and multi-expert collaborative framework, where the task-aware gating operates in two stages: degradation-aware gating dynamically allocates expert groups for restoration based on degradation types, and fusion-aware gating guides feature integration across modalities to balance information retention between fusion and restoration tasks. To achieve this, we design a two-stage training strategy that unifies the learning of restoration and fusion tasks. This strategy resolves the inherent conflict in information processing between the two tasks, enabling all-in-one multi-modal image restoration and fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that TG-ECNet significantly enhances fusion performance under diverse complex degradation conditions and improves robustness in downstream applications. The code is available at https://github.com/LeeX54946/TG-ECNet.

Poster
Navigating Semantic Drift in Task-Agnostic Class-Incremental Learning

Fangwen Wu, Lechao Cheng, Shengeng Tang, Xiaofeng Zhu, Chaowei Fang, Dingwen Zhang, Meng Wang

展开摘要

Class-incremental learning (CIL) seeks to enable a model to sequentially learn new classes while retaining knowledge of previously learned ones. Balancing flexibility and stability remains a significant challenge, particularly when the task ID is unknown. To address this, our study reveals that the gap in feature distribution between novel and existing tasks is primarily driven by differences in mean and covariance moments. Building on this insight, we propose a novel semantic drift calibration method that incorporates mean shift compensation and covariance calibration. Specifically, we calculate each class's mean by averaging its sample embeddings and estimate task shifts using weighted embedding changes based on their proximity to the previous mean, effectively capturing mean shifts for all learned classes with each new task. We also apply Mahalanobis distance constraint for covariance calibration, aligning class-specific embedding covariances between old and current networks to mitigate the covariance shift. Additionally, we integrate a feature-level self-distillation approach to enhance generalization. Comprehensive experiments on commonly used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/fwu11/MACIL.git.

Oral
A Mixed-Curvature based Pre-training Paradigm for Multi-Task Vehicle Routing Solver

Suyu Liu, Zhiguang Cao, Shanshan Feng, Yew-Soon Ong

展开摘要

Solving various types of vehicle routing problems (VRPs) using a unified neural solver has garnered significant attentions in recent years. Despite their effectiveness, existing neural multi-task solvers often fail to account for the geometric structures inherent in different tasks, which may result in suboptimal performance. To address this limitation, we propose a curvature-aware pre-training framework. Specifically, we leverage mixed-curvature spaces during the feature fusion stage, encouraging the model to capture the underlying geometric properties of each instance. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the proposed pre-training strategy on existing neural multi-task solvers across a variety of testing scenarios. The results demonstrate that the curvature-aware pre-training approach not only enhances the generalization capabilities of existing neural VRP solvers on synthetic datasets but also improves solution quality on real-world benchmarks.

Poster
A Large Recurrent Action Model: xLSTM enables Fast Inference for Robotics Tasks

Thomas Schmied, Thomas Adler, Vihang Prakash Patil, Maximilian Beck, Korbinian Pöppel, Johannes Brandstetter, Günter Klambauer, Razvan Pascanu, Sepp Hochreiter

展开摘要

In recent years, there has been a trend in the field of Reinforcement Learning (RL) towards large action models trained offline on large-scale datasets via sequence modeling. Existing models are primarily based on the Transformer architecture, which results in powerful agents. However, due to slow inference times, Transformer-based approaches are impractical for real-time applications, such as robotics. Recently, modern recurrent architectures, such as xLSTM and Mamba, have been proposed that exhibit parallelization benefits during training similar to the Transformer architecture while offering fast inference. In this work, we study the aptitude of these modern recurrent architectures for large action models. Consequently, we propose a Large Recurrent Action Model (LRAM) with an xLSTM at its core that comes with linear-time inference complexity and natural sequence length extrapolation abilities. Experiments on 432 tasks from 6 domains show that LRAM compares favorably to Transformers in terms of performance and speed.

Poster
Learngene Tells You How to Customize: Task-Aware Parameter Initialization at Flexible Scales

Jiaze Xu, Shiyu Xia, Xu Yang, Jiaqi Lv, Xin Geng

展开摘要

Appropriate parameter initialization strategies are essential for reducing the high computational costs of training large pretrained models in various task scenarios. Graph HyperNetwork (GHN), a parameter initialization method, has recently demonstrated strong performance in initializing models. However, GHN still faces several challenges, including limited effectiveness in initializing larger models, poor performance on smaller datasets, and the requirement of task-specific GHN training, where each new task necessitates retraining the GHN model, leading to increased computational and storage overhead. To overcome these challenges, motivated by the recently proposed Learngene framework, we propose a novel method called **T**ask-**A**ware **L**earngene (**TAL**). Briefly, our approach pretrains a TAL model under the guidance of a well-trained model and then performs multi-task tuning to obtain a shared TAL model that enables parameter prediction based on both model architectures and task-specific characteristics. Extensive experiments show the superiority of TAL. Models initialized with TAL outperform those initialized using GHN method by an average of 24.39\% in terms of accuracy across Decathlon datasets.

Poster
Modeling Multi-Task Model Merging as Adaptive Projective Gradient Descent

Yongxian Wei, Anke Tang, Li Shen, Zixuan Hu, Chun Yuan, Xiaochun Cao

展开摘要

Merging multiple expert models offers a promising approach for performing multi-task learning without accessing their original data. Existing methods attempt to alleviate task conflicts by sparsifying task vectors or promoting orthogonality among them. However, they overlook the fundamental target of model merging: the merged model performs as closely as possible to task-specific models on respective tasks. We find these methods inevitably discard task-specific information that, while causing conflicts, is crucial for performance. Based on our findings, we frame model merging as a constrained optimization problem ($\textit{i.e.}$, minimizing the gap between the merged model and individual models, subject to the constraint of retaining shared knowledge) and solve it via adaptive projective gradient descent. Specifically, we align the merged model with individual models by decomposing and reconstituting the loss function, alleviating conflicts through $\textit{data-free}$ optimization of task vectors. To retain shared knowledge, we optimize this objective by projecting gradients within a $\textit{shared subspace}$ spanning all tasks. Moreover, we view merging coefficients as adaptive learning rates and propose a task-aware, training-free strategy. Experiments show that our plug-and-play approach consistently outperforms previous methods, achieving state-of-the-art results across diverse architectures and tasks in both vision and NLP domains.

Poster
Bifurcate then Alienate: Incomplete Multi-view Clustering via Coupled Distribution Learning with Linear Overhead

Shengju Yu, Yiu-ming Cheung, Siwei Wang, Xinwang Liu, En Zhu

展开摘要

Despite remarkable advances, existing incomplete multi-view clustering (IMC) methods typically leverage either perspective-shared or perspective-specific determinants to encode cluster representations. To address this limitation, we introduce a BACDL algorithm designed to explicitly capture both concurrently, thereby exploiting heterogeneous data more effectively. It chooses to bifurcate feature clusters and further alienate them to enlarge the discrimination. With distribution learning, it successfully couples view guidance into feature clusters to alleviate dimension inconsistency. Then, building on the principle that samples in one common cluster own similar marginal distribution and conditional distribution, it unifies the association between feature clusters and sample clusters to bridge all views. Thereafter, all incomplete sample clusters are reordered and mapped to a common one to formulate clustering embedding. Last, the overall linear overhead endows it with a resource-efficient characteristic.

Poster
Provable In-Context Vector Arithmetic via Retrieving Task Concepts

Dake Bu, Wei Huang, Andi Han, Atsushi Nitanda, Qingfu Zhang, Hau-San Wong, Taiji Suzuki

展开摘要

In-context learning (ICL) has garnered significant attention for its ability to grasp functions/tasks from demonstrations. Recent studies suggest the presence of a latent **task/function vector** in LLMs during ICL. Merullo et al. (2024) showed that LLMs leverage this vector alongside the residual stream for Word2Vec-like vector arithmetic, solving factual-recall ICL tasks. Additionally, recent work empirically highlighted the key role of Question-Answer data in enhancing factual-recall capabilities. Despite these insights, a theoretical explanation remains elusive. To move one step forward, we propose a theoretical framework building on empirically grounded *hierarchical* concept modeling. We develop an optimization theory, showing how nonlinear residual transformers trained via gradient descent on cross-entropy loss perform factual-recall ICL tasks via vector arithmetic. We prove 0-1 loss convergence and show the strong generalization, including robustness to concept recombination and distribution shifts. These results elucidate the advantages of transformers over static embedding predecessors. Empirical simulations corroborate our theoretical insights.

Poster
CaDA: Cross-Problem Routing Solver with Constraint-Aware Dual-Attention

Han Li, Fei Liu, Zhi Zheng, Yu Zhang, Zhenkun Wang

展开摘要

Vehicle routing problems (VRPs) are significant combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) holding substantial practical importance. Recently, neural combinatorial optimization (NCO), which involves training deep learning models on extensive data to learn vehicle routing heuristics, has emerged as a promising approach due to its efficiency and the reduced need for manual algorithm design. However, applying NCO across diverse real-world scenarios with various constraints necessitates cross-problem capabilities. Current cross-problem NCO methods for VRPs typically employ a constraint-unaware model, limiting their cross-problem performance. Furthermore, they rely solely on global connectivity, which fails to focus on key nodes and leads to inefficient representation learning. This paper introduces a \underline{C}onstraint-\underline{A}ware \underline{D}ual-\underline{A}ttention Model (CaDA), designed to address these limitations. CaDA incorporates a constraint prompt that efficiently represents different problem variants. Additionally, it features a dual-attention mechanism with a global branch for capturing broader graph-wide information and a sparse branch that selectively focuses on the key node connections. We comprehensively evaluate our model on 16 different VRPs and compare its performance against existing cross-problem VRP solvers. CaDA achieves state-of-the-art results across all tested VRPs. Our ablation study confirms that each component contributes to its cross-problem learning performance. The source code for CaDA is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/CIAM-Group/CaDA}.

Poster
A General Representation-Based Approach to Multi-Source Domain Adaptation

Ignavier Ng, Yan Li, Zijian Li, Yujia Zheng, Guangyi Chen, Kun Zhang

展开摘要

A central problem in unsupervised domain adaptation is determining what to transfer from labeled source domains to an unlabeled target domain. To handle high-dimensional observations (e.g., images), a line of approaches use deep learning to learn latent representations of the observations, which facilitate knowledge transfer in the latent space. However, existing approaches often rely on restrictive assumptions to establish identifiability of the joint distribution in the target domain, such as independent latent variables or invariant label distributions, limiting their real-world applicability. In this work, we propose a general domain adaptation framework that learns compact latent representations to capture distribution shifts relative to the prediction task and address the fundamental question of what representations should be learned and transferred. Notably, we first demonstrate that learning representations based on all the predictive information, i.e., the label's Markov blanket in terms of the learned representations, is often underspecified in general settings. Instead, we show that, interestingly, general domain adaptation can be achieved by partitioning the representations of Markov blanket into those of the label's parents, children, and spouses. Moreover, its identifiability guarantee can be established. Building on these theoretical insights, we develop a practical, nonparametric approach for domain adaptation in a general setting, which can handle different types of distribution shifts.

Poster
FEAT-KD: Learning Concise Representations for Single and Multi-Target Regression via TabNet Knowledge Distillation

Kei Sen Fong, Mehul Motani

展开摘要

In this work, we propose a novel approach that combines the strengths of FEAT and TabNet through knowledge distillation (KD), which we term FEAT-KD. FEAT is an intrinsically interpretable machine learning (ML) algorithm that constructs a weighted linear combination of concisely-represented features discovered via genetic programming optimization, which can often be inefficient. FEAT-KD leverages TabNet's deep-learning-based optimization and feature selection mechanisms instead. FEAT-KD finds a weighted linear combination of concisely-represented, symbolic features that are derived from piece-wise distillation of a trained TabNet model. We analyze FEAT-KD on regression tasks from two perspectives: (i) compared to TabNet, FEAT-KD significantly reduces model complexity while retaining competitive predictive performance, effectively converting a black-box deep learning model into a more interpretable white-box representation, (ii) compared to FEAT, our method consistently outperforms in prediction accuracy, produces more compact models, and reduces the complexity of learned symbolic expressions. In addition, we demonstrate that FEAT-KD easily supports multi-target regression, in which the shared features contribute to the interpretability of the system. Our results suggest that FEAT-KD is a promising direction for interpretable ML, bridging the gap between deep learning's predictive power and the intrinsic transparency of symbolic models.

Poster
Robust Consensus Anchor Learning for Efficient Multi-view Subspace Clustering

Yalan Qin, Nan Pu, Guorui Feng, Nicu Sebe

展开摘要

As a leading unsupervised classification algorithm in artificial intelligence, multi-view subspace clustering segments unlabeled data from different subspaces. Recent works based on the anchor have been proposed to decrease the computation complexity for the datasets with large scales in multi-view clustering. The major differences among these methods lie on the objective functions they define. Despite considerable success, these works pay few attention to guaranting the robustness of learned consensus anchors via effective manner for efficient multi-view clustering and investigating the specific local distribution of cluster in the affine subspace. Besides, the robust consensus anchors as well as the common cluster structure shared by different views are not able to be simultaneously learned. In this paper, we propose Robust Consensus anchors learning for efficient multi-view Subspace Clustering (RCSC). We first show that if the data are sufficiently sampled from independent subspaces, and the objective function meets some conditions, the achieved anchor graph has the block-diagonal structure. As a special case, we provide a model based on Frobenius norm, non-negative and affine constraints in consensus anchors learning, which guarantees the robustness of learned consensus anchors for efficient multi-view clustering and investigates the specific local distribution of cluster in the affine subspace. While it is simple, we theoretically give the geometric analysis regarding the formulated RCSC. The union of these three constraints is able to restrict how each data point is described in the affine subspace with specific local distribution of cluster for guaranting the robustness of learned consensus anchors. RCSC takes full advantages of correlation among consensus anchors, which encourages the grouping effect and groups highly correlated consensus anchors together with the guidance of view-specific projection. The anchor graph construction, partition and robust anchor learning are jointly integrated into a unified framework. It ensures the mutual enhancement for these procedures and helps lead to more discriminative consensus anchors as well as the cluster indicator. We then adopt an alternative optimization strategy for solving the formulated problem. Experiments performed on eight multi-view datasets confirm the superiority of RCSC based on the effectiveness and efficiency.

Poster