Task-Aware Information Decoupling for Multimodal Clustering

Multimodal clustering (MMC) overcomes the limitations of unimodal methods by integrating information from multiple sources, but the complexity of heterogeneous information coupling hinders effective feature extraction. Critically, existing MMC paradigms primarily focus on capturing consensus through coarse-grained cross-modal alignment. However, such task-agnostic strategies overlook the differences in the utility of feature information across varying task environments. In the absence of task-centric guidance, models often struggle to effectively distinguish task-relevant critical information from task-irrelevant redundant noise during the disentanglement process, leading to information confusion in the representation space. To address this challenge, we propose a deep disentangled multimodal clustering method guided by information theory, named DRLMMC, which employs a tripartite information optimization mechanism to achieve deep disentanglement of cross-modal representations. 1) We design modality-specific encoders to construct nonlinear mapping spaces, transforming the reconstruction mechanism of autoencoders into an information-theoretic mutual information (MI) constraint problem, preserving the unique features of different modalities; 2) To establish cross-modal semantic associations, it constructs a cross-modal shared information extraction module, and, based on an information-theoretic framework, designs an optimization objective function to progressively align multimodal feature subspaces through MI maximization and contrastive learning, capturing task-relevant invariant features across modalities; 3) A unique information dynamic perception module is proposed, which employs a conditional MI projection network combined with learning distribution regularization to adaptively extract and enhance modality-specific task-relevant unique information. Experimental results demonstrate that DRLMMC outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on multimodal benchmark datasets, exhibiting excellent generalization ability. Notably, it achieves precise disentanglement of cross-omics features in multi-omics analysis, offering a novel methodological approach for handling complex biomedical data.