Progressive Adversarial Multi-View Alignment for Unsupervised Embedded Feature Selection with Linear Complexity

Abstract

Standard unsupervised multi-view feature selection (UMFS) methods for large datasets exhibit limitations in modeling the competition between cross-view alignment and intra-view diversity, resulting in suboptimal solutions and expensive computational costs. This challenge is exacerbated by the diverse signals inherent in complex samples, which tend to mask shared patterns, thus complicating the pursuit of an optimal trade-off. In this work, we propose a Progressive Adversarial Feature Selection (ProAd-FS) framework for large-scale multi-view learning, which formulates this static trade-off objective as a dynamic competitive process. To be specific, ProAd-FS develops an adversarial decoupled architecture that assigns these competing objectives to distinct inter-view and intra-view games, guided by a robust gated curriculum to prioritize the learning of underlying structures. The entire framework exhibits linear computational complexity in both sample size and feature dimension, and embeds structural sparse regularization for end-to-end optimization. Extensive experimental results show that ProAd-FS achieves state-of-the-art performance while being highly scalable as well, providing an effective solution for large-scale UMFS tasks.