# Breaking the Periodicity Assumption: Robust Tensorial Multi-View Clustering via Graph-Spectral Low-Rank Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.25295 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.25295/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Tensor Robust Principal Component Analysis with A New Tensor Nuclear Norm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03728/) (2018)
- [Tensor Robust Principal Component Analysis: Exact Recovery of Corrupted Low-Rank Tensors via Convex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04181/) (2017)
- [On Unifying Multi-View Self-Representations for Clustering by Tensor Multi-Rank Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07126/) (2016)
- [Multi-View Clustering for Open Knowledge Base Canonicalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11130/) (2022)
- [Label Learning Method Based on Tensor Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16544/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Tensorial multi-view clustering (TMC) has achieved strong performance due to its ability to capture high-order correlations across multiple views. Most existing t-SVD-based TMC frameworks apply the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) along the sample mode to impose frequency-domain low-rank constraints. However, we reveal that this widely adopted design critically relies on an implicit ``periodicity assumption'' induced by the sample arrangement. When samples are ordered by class, neighboring indices tend to be semantically similar, creating artificial local continuity along the sample mode and a favorable spectral structure for FFT-based low-rank regularization. Once this ordering is removed by random permutation, existing t-SVD-based TMC methods suffer severe performance degradation. This strong sensitivity to class ordering conflicts with the permutation-invariant nature of clustering and indicates that part of the reported performance may be attributed to a privileged sample arrangement rather than genuine high-order structure modeling. In this paper, we systematically investigate this phenomenon and its underlying algebraic and spectral mechanisms. To address this fundamental flaw, we further propose a graph-spectral low-rank tensor learning framework based on the Graph Fourier Transform (GFT), which replaces the fixed Fourier basis along the sample mode with a data-driven graph spectral basis, thereby capturing the intrinsic manifold structure without relying on a particular sample ordering. Moreover, we develop an anchor-based variant to address large-scale datasets efficiently. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks validate our findings and demonstrate the competitive or superior performance of the proposed methods compared with state-of-the-art TMC approaches.