Few-shot Novel Category Discovery

Few-shot Novel Category Discovery

Chunming Li, Shidong Wang, Haofeng Zhang

Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1350-1358. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/151

The recently proposed Novel Category Discovery (NCD) adapt paradigm of transductive learning hinders its application in more real-world scenarios. In fact, few labeled data in part of new categories can well alleviate this burden, which coincides with the ease that people can label few of new category data. Therefore, this paper presents a new setting in which a trained agent is able to flexibly switch between the tasks of identifying examples of known (labelled) classes and clustering novel (completely unlabeled) classes as the number of query examples increases by leveraging knowledge learned from only a few (handful) support examples. Drawing inspiration from the discovery of novel categories using prior-based clustering algorithms, we introduce a novel framework that further relaxes its assumptions to the real-world open set level by unifying the concept of model adaptability in few-shot learning. We refer to this setting as Few-Shot Novel Category Discovery (FSNCD) and propose Semi-supervised Hierarchical Clustering (SHC) and Uncertainty-aware K-means Clustering (UKC) to examine the model's reasoning capabilities. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis on five commonly used datasets demonstrate that our methods can achieve leading performance levels across different task settings and scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/Ashengl/FSNCD.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Transfer, low-shot, semi- and un- supervised learning   
Machine Learning: ML: Open-World/Open-Set/OOD Learning