CDAD-Net: Bridging Domain Gaps in Generalized Category Discovery

Sai Bhargav Rongali, Sarthak Mehrotra, Ankit Jha, Mohamad Hassan N C, Shirsha Bose, Tanisha Gupta, Mainak Singha, Biplab Banerjee; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops, 2024, pp. 2616-2626

In Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) we cluster unlabeled samples of known and novel classes leveraging a training dataset of known classes. A salient challenge arises due to domain shifts between these datasets. To address this we present a novel setting: Across Domain Generalized Category Discovery (AD-GCD) and bring forth CDAD-Net (Class Discoverer Across Domains) as a remedy. CDAD-Net is architected to synchronize potential known class samples across both the labeled (source) and unlabeled (target) datasets while emphasizing the distinct categorization of the target data. To facilitate this we propose an entropy-driven adversarial learning strategy that accounts for the distance distributions of target samples relative to source-domain class prototypes. Parallelly the discriminative nature of the shared space is upheld through a fusion of three metric learning objectives. In the source domain our focus is on refining the proximity between samples and their affiliated class prototypes while in the target domain we integrate a neighborhood-centric contrastive learning mechanism enriched with an adept neighbors-mining approach. To further accentuate the nuanced feature interrelation among semantically aligned images we champion the concept of conditional image inpainting underscoring the premise that semantically analogous images prove more efficacious to the task than their disjointed counterparts. Experimentally CDAD-Net eclipses existing literature with a performance increment of 8-15 % on three AD-GCD benchmarks we present.