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Main Authors: Xia, Jingyuan, Hu, Ruikang, Li, Ye, Yang, Zhixiong, Lan, Xu, Lu, Zhejun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22174
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author Xia, Jingyuan
Hu, Ruikang
Li, Ye
Yang, Zhixiong
Lan, Xu
Lu, Zhejun
author_facet Xia, Jingyuan
Hu, Ruikang
Li, Ye
Yang, Zhixiong
Lan, Xu
Lu, Zhejun
contents Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) holds significant promise for the label-scarce Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) domain, yet its efficacy is severely constrained by the cross-modal incompatibility between the inherent optical prior of the Large Vision Models (LVMs) and SAR imagery. Existing domain adaptation methods often lack an inductive bias that reflects imaging characteristics, consequently failing to effectively transfer optical prior into the SAR domain. To address this issue, the Modal Discrepancy Curve (MDC) is introduced to model cross-modal discrepancy as a structured frequency-domain descriptor derived from spectral energy distributions. Leveraging this formulation, we propose the MDC-guided Cross-modal Prior Transfer (MCPT) framework, a pre-training paradigm that operates on paired optical-SAR data. Within this framework, Adaptive Frequency Tokenization (AFT) converts the MDC into learnable tokens, and Frequency-aware Expert Refinement (FER) performs band-wise discrepancy-aware feature refinement using these tokens. Based on the refined representations, contrastive learning aligns refined embeddings across modalities and internalizes the adaptation pattern. Ultimately, the superior SAR feature representation capability learned during paired pre-training is applied to downstream single-modal SAR-GCD tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple mainstream datasets, indicating that frequency-domain discrepancy modeling enables more effective adaptation of optical prior to SAR imagery.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_22174
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unlocking Optical Prior: Spectrum-Guided Knowledge Transfer for SAR Generalized Category Discovery
Xia, Jingyuan
Hu, Ruikang
Li, Ye
Yang, Zhixiong
Lan, Xu
Lu, Zhejun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) holds significant promise for the label-scarce Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) domain, yet its efficacy is severely constrained by the cross-modal incompatibility between the inherent optical prior of the Large Vision Models (LVMs) and SAR imagery. Existing domain adaptation methods often lack an inductive bias that reflects imaging characteristics, consequently failing to effectively transfer optical prior into the SAR domain. To address this issue, the Modal Discrepancy Curve (MDC) is introduced to model cross-modal discrepancy as a structured frequency-domain descriptor derived from spectral energy distributions. Leveraging this formulation, we propose the MDC-guided Cross-modal Prior Transfer (MCPT) framework, a pre-training paradigm that operates on paired optical-SAR data. Within this framework, Adaptive Frequency Tokenization (AFT) converts the MDC into learnable tokens, and Frequency-aware Expert Refinement (FER) performs band-wise discrepancy-aware feature refinement using these tokens. Based on the refined representations, contrastive learning aligns refined embeddings across modalities and internalizes the adaptation pattern. Ultimately, the superior SAR feature representation capability learned during paired pre-training is applied to downstream single-modal SAR-GCD tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple mainstream datasets, indicating that frequency-domain discrepancy modeling enables more effective adaptation of optical prior to SAR imagery.
title Unlocking Optical Prior: Spectrum-Guided Knowledge Transfer for SAR Generalized Category Discovery
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22174