# Transfer and Alignment Network for Generalized Category Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.16467 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16467/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02685/) (2019)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04807/) (2020)
- [An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02027/) (2019)
- [Towards K-means-friendly Spaces: Simultaneous Deep Learning and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.04794/) (2016)
- [Learning to Discover Novel Visual Categories via Deep Transfer Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09884/) (2019)
- [Mutual Mean-Teaching: Pseudo Label Refinery for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Person Re-identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.01526/) (2020)
- [Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03526/) (2021)
- [Transferrable Prototypical Networks for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11227/) (2019)
- [Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Novel Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10731/) (2021)
- [OVANet: One-vs-All Network for Universal Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03344/) (2021)
- [Discovering New Intents with Deep Aligned Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08987/) (2020)
- [Discovering New Intents via Constrained Deep Adaptive Clustering with Cluster Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08891/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Intent Detection via Contrastive Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06349/) (2021)
- [Generalized Category Discovery with Decoupled Prototypical Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15115/) (2022)
- [Transfer Knowledge from Head to Tail: Uncertainty Calibration under Long-tailed Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06537/) (2023)
- [A Diffusion Weighted Graph Framework for New Intent Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15836/) (2023)
- [DNA: Denoised Neighborhood Aggregation for Fine-grained Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10151/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Flipped Classroom: Aligning Teacher Attention with Student in Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19659/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Ontology Expansion for Conversational Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15019/) (2024)
- [Category Discovery: An Open-World Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22542/) (2025)
- [Beyond Known Clusters: Probe New Prototypes for Efficient Generalized Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08995/) (2024)
- [AdaptGCD: Multi-Expert Adapter Tuning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21705/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Generalized Category Discovery With Retrieval-Guided Decision Boundary Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16728/) (2025)
- [Generalized Category Discovery in Event-Centric Contexts: Latent Pattern Mining with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23304/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized Category Discovery is a crucial real-world task. Despite the improved performance on known categories, current methods perform poorly on novel categories. We attribute the poor performance to two reasons: biased knowledge transfer between labeled and unlabeled data and noisy representation learning on the unlabeled data. To mitigate these two issues, we propose a Transfer and Alignment Network (TAN), which incorporates two knowledge transfer mechanisms to calibrate the biased knowledge and two feature alignment mechanisms to learn discriminative features. Specifically, we model different categories with prototypes and transfer the prototypes in labeled data to correct model bias towards known categories. On the one hand, we pull instances with known categories in unlabeled data closer to these prototypes to form more compact clusters and avoid boundary overlap between known and novel categories. On the other hand, we use these prototypes to calibrate noisy prototypes estimated from unlabeled data based on category similarities, which allows for more accurate estimation of prototypes for novel categories that can be used as reliable learning targets later. After knowledge transfer, we further propose two feature alignment mechanisms to acquire both instance- and category-level knowledge from unlabeled data by aligning instance features with both augmented features and the calibrated prototypes, which can boost model performance on both known and novel categories with less noise. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our model outperforms SOTA methods, especially on novel categories. Theoretical analysis is provided for an in-depth understanding of our model in general. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Lackel/TAN.