Incomplete Multi-View Multi-Label Classification via Shared Codebook and Fused-Teacher Self-Distillation

Incomplete multi-view multi-label learning requires not only robust semantic aggregation from partially observed views, but also label-aware exploitation of view-specific evidence. Existing approaches usually emphasize either shared representation learning or decision-level fusion. The former improves robustness against missing views, yet tends to compress label-discriminative view-specific cues into a single latent representation. The latter preserves individual view predictions, but often relies on fixed or globally learned fusion weights, ignoring that different labels of different instances may require different views. To address these limitations, this paper presents V2L, a unified representation-decision framework for incomplete multi-view multi-label classification. On the representation side, V2L constructs semantically consistent variational posteriors from incomplete views through a perturbation-aware encoding mechanism, which provides a stable shared semantic basis. On the decision side, V2L introduces an active view-label relevance modeling strategy that estimates instance-wise and label-wise view contributions, allowing each label prediction to adaptively select useful view-specific evidence. From the perspective of model architecture, these two important strategies are integrated into a unified framework through a hybrid fusion architecture, simultaneously meeting the requirements of cross-view semantic consistency and representational complementarity. Extensive experiments under both incomplete and complete settings show that V2L achieves leading performance on five benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/justsmart/V2L.

Multi-view learning is widely applied to real-life datasets, but it often suffers from both missing views and missing labels. Prior probabilistic approaches addressed the missing view problem by using a product-of-experts scheme to aggregate representations from present views and achieved superior performance over deterministic classifiers, using the information bottleneck (IB) principle. However, the IB framework is inherently fully supervised and cannot leverage unlabeled data. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised generative model that utilizes both labeled and unlabeled samples in a unified framework. Our method maximizes the likelihood of unlabeled samples to learn a latent space shared with the IB on labeled data. We also include modality-specific information in likelihood modeling and perform cross-view mutual information maximization in the shared latent space to enhance the extraction of shared information across views. Compared to existing approaches, our model achieves better predictive and generation performance on complex datasets with missing views and limited labeled samples.

Prototype-based Incomplete Multi-view Clustering has recently attracted increasing attention by exploiting prototypes as semantic anchors for missing-view imputation. However, existing approaches are still limited in three aspects. First, they typically focus on enforcing cross-view prototype consistency, while ignoring view-specific information embedded in prototypes, thus limiting multi-view expressiveness. Second, most methods rely on instance-level contrastive learning that only aligns paired samples across views, failing to preserve cluster-level relational structures. Third, missing-view imputation is usually performed using global prototypes alone, without considering local geometric neighborhood structures, leading to inaccurate recovery of missing representations. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework termed Structure-aware PrOtotype disentanglement foR incomplete multi-view clusTering (SPORT), which explicitly disentangles shared and view-specific components of prototypes while preserving cluster-level relational structures. Specifically, we decouple prototypes into orthogonal shared and view-specific components, aligning only shared components to capture consensus semantics while de-correlating view-specific components to preserve complementary information. Meanwhile, a structure-aware contrastive learning mechanism is incorporated to explicitly model cluster-level relationships during cross-view representation learning. Furthermore, a hybrid imputation strategy integrates global prototype matching with local neighborhood matching, enabling joint exploitation of semantic prototypes and manifold structures for missing-view recovery. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show that SPORT achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods under various missing rates.