Few-Shot Generalized Category Discovery With Retrieval-Guided Decision Boundary Enhancement

Abstract

While existing Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) models have achieved significant success, their performance with limited labeled samples and a small number of known categories remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce the task of Few-shot Generalized Category Discovery (FSGCD), aiming to achieve competitive performance in GCD tasks under conditions of known information scarcity. To tackle this challenge, we propose a decision boundary enhancement framework with affinity-based retrieval. Our framework is designed to learn the decision boundaries of known categories and transfer these boundaries to unknown categories. First, we use a decision boundary pre-training module to mitigate the overfitting of pre-trained information on known category boundaries and improve the learning of these decision boundaries using labeled samples. Second, we implement a two-stage retrieval-guided decision boundary optimization strategy. Specifically, this strategy further enhances the severely limited known boundaries by using affinity-retrieved pseudo-labeled samples. Then, these refined boundaries are applied to unknown clusters via guidance from affinity-based feature retrieval. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing methods on six public GCD benchmarks under the FSGCD setting. The codes are available at: https://github.com/Ryh1218/FSGCD