Freeze and Cluster: A Simple Baseline for Rehearsal-Free Continual Category Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Chuyu, Yu, Xueyang, Gu, Peiyan, He, Xuming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Chuyu
Yu, Xueyang
Gu, Peiyan
He, Xuming
author_facet Zhang, Chuyu
Yu, Xueyang
Gu, Peiyan
He, Xuming
contents This paper addresses the problem of Rehearsal-Free Continual Category Discovery (RF-CCD), which focuses on continuously identifying novel class by leveraging knowledge from labeled data. Existing methods typically train from scratch, overlooking the potential of base models, and often resort to data storage to prevent forgetting. Moreover, because RF-CCD encompasses both continual learning and novel class discovery, previous approaches have struggled to effectively integrate advanced techniques from these fields, resulting in less convincing comparisons and failing to reveal the unique challenges posed by RF-CCD. To address these challenges, we lead the way in integrating advancements from both domains and conducting extensive experiments and analyses. Our findings demonstrate that this integration can achieve state-of-the-art results, leading to the conclusion that in the presence of pre-trained models, the representation does not improve and may even degrade with the introduction of unlabeled data. To mitigate representation degradation, we propose a straightforward yet highly effective baseline method. This method first utilizes prior knowledge of known categories to estimate the number of novel classes. It then acquires representations using a model specifically trained on the base classes, generates high-quality pseudo-labels through k-means clustering, and trains only the classifier layer. We validate our conclusions and methods by conducting extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, including the Stanford Cars, CUB, iNat, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets. The results clearly illustrate our findings, demonstrate the effectiveness of our baseline, and pave the way for future advancements in RF-CCD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_09106
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Freeze and Cluster: A Simple Baseline for Rehearsal-Free Continual Category Discovery
Zhang, Chuyu
Yu, Xueyang
Gu, Peiyan
He, Xuming
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
This paper addresses the problem of Rehearsal-Free Continual Category Discovery (RF-CCD), which focuses on continuously identifying novel class by leveraging knowledge from labeled data. Existing methods typically train from scratch, overlooking the potential of base models, and often resort to data storage to prevent forgetting. Moreover, because RF-CCD encompasses both continual learning and novel class discovery, previous approaches have struggled to effectively integrate advanced techniques from these fields, resulting in less convincing comparisons and failing to reveal the unique challenges posed by RF-CCD. To address these challenges, we lead the way in integrating advancements from both domains and conducting extensive experiments and analyses. Our findings demonstrate that this integration can achieve state-of-the-art results, leading to the conclusion that in the presence of pre-trained models, the representation does not improve and may even degrade with the introduction of unlabeled data. To mitigate representation degradation, we propose a straightforward yet highly effective baseline method. This method first utilizes prior knowledge of known categories to estimate the number of novel classes. It then acquires representations using a model specifically trained on the base classes, generates high-quality pseudo-labels through k-means clustering, and trains only the classifier layer. We validate our conclusions and methods by conducting extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks, including the Stanford Cars, CUB, iNat, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets. The results clearly illustrate our findings, demonstrate the effectiveness of our baseline, and pave the way for future advancements in RF-CCD.
title Freeze and Cluster: A Simple Baseline for Rehearsal-Free Continual Category Discovery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.09106