Generalized Fine-Grained Category Discovery with Multi-Granularity Conceptual Experts

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zheng, Haiyang, Pu, Nan, Li, Wenjing, Sebe, Nicu, Zhong, Zhun
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zheng, Haiyang
Pu, Nan
Li, Wenjing
Sebe, Nicu
Zhong, Zhun
author_facet Zheng, Haiyang
Pu, Nan
Li, Wenjing
Sebe, Nicu
Zhong, Zhun
contents Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an open-world problem that clusters unlabeled data by leveraging knowledge from partially labeled categories. A key challenge is that unlabeled data may contain both known and novel categories. Existing approaches suffer from two main limitations. First, they fail to exploit multi-granularity conceptual information in visual data, which limits representation quality. Second, most assume that the number of unlabeled categories is known during training, which is impractical in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Granularity Conceptual Experts (MGCE) framework that adaptively mines visual concepts and integrates multi-granularity knowledge for accurate category discovery. MGCE consists of two modules: (1) Dynamic Conceptual Contrastive Learning (DCCL), which alternates between concept mining and dual-level representation learning to jointly optimize feature learning and category discovery; and (2) Multi-Granularity Experts Collaborative Learning (MECL), which extends the single-expert paradigm by introducing additional experts at different granularities and by employing a concept alignment matrix for effective cross-expert collaboration. Importantly, MGCE can automatically estimate the number of categories in unlabeled data, making it suitable for practical open-world settings. Extensive experiments on nine fine-grained visual recognition benchmarks demonstrate that MGCE achieves state-of-the-art results, particularly in novel-class accuracy. Notably, even without prior knowledge of category numbers, MGCE outperforms parametric approaches that require knowing the exact number of categories, with an average improvement of 3.6\%. Code is available at https://github.com/HaiyangZheng/MGCE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_26227
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalized Fine-Grained Category Discovery with Multi-Granularity Conceptual Experts
Zheng, Haiyang
Pu, Nan
Li, Wenjing
Sebe, Nicu
Zhong, Zhun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an open-world problem that clusters unlabeled data by leveraging knowledge from partially labeled categories. A key challenge is that unlabeled data may contain both known and novel categories. Existing approaches suffer from two main limitations. First, they fail to exploit multi-granularity conceptual information in visual data, which limits representation quality. Second, most assume that the number of unlabeled categories is known during training, which is impractical in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a Multi-Granularity Conceptual Experts (MGCE) framework that adaptively mines visual concepts and integrates multi-granularity knowledge for accurate category discovery. MGCE consists of two modules: (1) Dynamic Conceptual Contrastive Learning (DCCL), which alternates between concept mining and dual-level representation learning to jointly optimize feature learning and category discovery; and (2) Multi-Granularity Experts Collaborative Learning (MECL), which extends the single-expert paradigm by introducing additional experts at different granularities and by employing a concept alignment matrix for effective cross-expert collaboration. Importantly, MGCE can automatically estimate the number of categories in unlabeled data, making it suitable for practical open-world settings. Extensive experiments on nine fine-grained visual recognition benchmarks demonstrate that MGCE achieves state-of-the-art results, particularly in novel-class accuracy. Notably, even without prior knowledge of category numbers, MGCE outperforms parametric approaches that require knowing the exact number of categories, with an average improvement of 3.6\%. Code is available at https://github.com/HaiyangZheng/MGCE.
title Generalized Fine-Grained Category Discovery with Multi-Granularity Conceptual Experts
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26227