ORCA: Orthogonal Residual Consensus Alignment for Multi-View Clustering

Deep multi-view clustering often struggles with inter-view feature redundancy and dimensionality collapse during iterative representation fusion. To address these limitations, we propose Orthogonal Residual Consensus Alignment (ORCA). First, a Semantic Incremental Recurrent Fusion (SIRF) module explicitly separates shared redundancy from complementary residuals via geometric projection. By employing an adaptive halting mechanism, SIRF autonomously maximizes information gain while avoiding structural collapse. Second, a Consensus-Calibrated Hierarchical Contrastive Alignment (CCHA) module is introduced to preserve multi-scale semantics. It adaptively aligns view-level, local, and recurrent representations using the global consensus as a semantic anchor. Consequently, ORCA learns latent representations with robust structural integrity and highly discriminative semantics. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that ORCA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, with comprehensive ablations verifying its robustness.