Abstract
Traditional clustering techniques often rely solely on similarity in the input data, limiting their ability to capture structural or semantic constraints that are critical in many domains. We introduce the Domain Aware Rule Triggered Variational Autoencoder (DARTVAE), a rule guided multimodal clustering framework that incorporates domain specific constraints directly into the representation learning process. DARTVAE extends the VAE architecture by embedding explicit rules, semantic representations, and data driven features into a unified latent space, while enforcing constraint compliance through rule consistency and violation penalties in the loss function. Unlike conventional clustering methods that rely only on visual similarity or apply rules as post hoc filters, DARTVAE treats rules as first class learning signals. The rules are generated by LLMs, structured into knowledge graphs, and enforced through a loss function combining reconstruction, KL divergence, consistency, and violat