ViTNF: Leveraging Neural Fields to Boost Vision Transformers in Generalized Category Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Su, Jiayi, Jin, Dequan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Su, Jiayi
Jin, Dequan
author_facet Su, Jiayi
Jin, Dequan
contents Generalized category discovery (GCD) is a highly popular task in open-world recognition, aiming to identify unknown class samples using known class data. By leveraging pre-training, meta-training, and fine-tuning, ViT achieves excellent few-shot learning capabilities. Its MLP head is a feedforward network, trained synchronously with the entire network in the same process, increasing the training cost and difficulty without fully leveraging the power of the feature extractor. This paper proposes a new architecture by replacing the MLP head with a neural field-based one. We first present a new static neural field function to describe the activity distribution of the neural field and then use two static neural field functions to build an efficient few-shot classifier. This neural field-based (NF) classifier consists of two coupled static neural fields. It stores the feature information of support samples by its elementary field, the known categories by its high-level field, and the category information of support samples by its cross-field connections. We replace the MLP head with the proposed NF classifier, resulting in a novel architecture ViTNF, and simplify the three-stage training mode by pre-training the feature extractor on source tasks and training the NF classifier with support samples in meta-testing separately, significantly reducing ViT's demand for training samples and the difficulty of model training. To enhance the model's capability in identifying new categories, we provide an effective algorithm to determine the lateral interaction scale of the elementary field. Experimental results demonstrate that our model surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, CUB-200, and Standard Cars, achieving dramatic accuracy improvements of 19\% and 16\% in new and all classes, respectively, indicating a notable advantage in GCD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ViTNF: Leveraging Neural Fields to Boost Vision Transformers in Generalized Category Discovery
Su, Jiayi
Jin, Dequan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
68T07
I.5.1
Generalized category discovery (GCD) is a highly popular task in open-world recognition, aiming to identify unknown class samples using known class data. By leveraging pre-training, meta-training, and fine-tuning, ViT achieves excellent few-shot learning capabilities. Its MLP head is a feedforward network, trained synchronously with the entire network in the same process, increasing the training cost and difficulty without fully leveraging the power of the feature extractor. This paper proposes a new architecture by replacing the MLP head with a neural field-based one. We first present a new static neural field function to describe the activity distribution of the neural field and then use two static neural field functions to build an efficient few-shot classifier. This neural field-based (NF) classifier consists of two coupled static neural fields. It stores the feature information of support samples by its elementary field, the known categories by its high-level field, and the category information of support samples by its cross-field connections. We replace the MLP head with the proposed NF classifier, resulting in a novel architecture ViTNF, and simplify the three-stage training mode by pre-training the feature extractor on source tasks and training the NF classifier with support samples in meta-testing separately, significantly reducing ViT's demand for training samples and the difficulty of model training. To enhance the model's capability in identifying new categories, we provide an effective algorithm to determine the lateral interaction scale of the elementary field. Experimental results demonstrate that our model surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, CUB-200, and Standard Cars, achieving dramatic accuracy improvements of 19\% and 16\% in new and all classes, respectively, indicating a notable advantage in GCD.
title ViTNF: Leveraging Neural Fields to Boost Vision Transformers in Generalized Category Discovery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
68T07
I.5.1
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02367