Resisting Label Drift: Real-Time Multi-View Clustering with Semantic Consistency

Abstract

Real-time clustering of dynamic multi-view data streams is a critical yet challenging task in open-world applications. While several methods have been proposed to address this task, most of them extract features incrementally but fail to output instant clustering results for the current batch. In addition, they neglect semantic consistency, causing the cluster labels of identical concepts to drift unpredictably due to independent processing. To address these limitations, we propose a real-time semantic consistent incremental multi-view clustering framework. Specifically, we constructs a compact historical knowledge base via an adaptive diversity-aware selection mechanism, which guides the clustering of incoming data, enabling immediate inference without accessing the full history. Furthermore, we introduce a semantic alignment strategy based on consensus centers to ensure robust label consistency over time. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.