Information-Theoretic Disentangled Latent Modeling with Conditional Diffusion for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering

Incomplete multi-view clustering is challenging due to view missingness and the entanglement of shared semantics with view-specific factors in latent representations. Existing methods often rely on heuristic fusion or direct completion strategies, which suffer from error propagation and unreliable generation under missing views. In this paper, we propose an Information-guided Disentangled latent modeling framework with Conditional Diffusion for incomplete multi-view clustering (IDCD). Specifically, we first encode each view into a latent representation that is variationally decomposed into a view-wise semantic latent and a view-specific factor. Information-theoretic objectives are introduced to guide the disentanglement of view-wise latents, preserving essential multi-view information while reducing the dependency between semantic and view-specific factors and encouraging cross-view semantic consistency. Besides, we aggregate the semantic latents via a mixture of Wasserstein distributions to obtain a unified global representation, where we impose a Gaussian mixture prior to explicitly couple representation learning with clustering. Based on the learned disentangled latent space, a conditional diffusion model guided by both the global semantic latent and view-specific factors is employed to generate missing views in a consistent manner. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate superior clustering performance and robust missing-view generation compared to state-of-the-art methods.