# AdaptGCD: Multi-Expert Adapter Tuning for Generalized Category Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21705 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21705/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 75 of its 106 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 75)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Switch Transformers: Scaling to Trillion Parameter Models with Simple and Efficient Sparsity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03961/) (2021)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Improved Baselines with Momentum Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04297/) (2020)
- [FixMatch: Simplifying Semi-Supervised Learning with Consistency and Confidence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07685/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Multiview Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05849/) (2019)
- [Temporal Ensembling for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02242/) (2016)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Large Models: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14608/) (2024)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [FlexMatch: Boosting Semi-Supervised Learning with Curriculum Pseudo Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08263/) (2021)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [LoraHub: Efficient Cross-Task Generalization via Dynamic LoRA Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13269/) (2023)
- [K-Adapter: Infusing Knowledge into Pre-Trained Models with Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01808/) (2020)
- [In Defense of Pseudo-Labeling: An Uncertainty-Aware Pseudo-label Selection Framework for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06329/) (2021)
- [LST: Ladder Side-Tuning for Parameter and Memory Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06522/) (2022)
- [Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02609/) (2022)
- [Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03526/) (2021)
- [A Unified Objective for Novel Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08536/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Sparsity Hurts: Simple Linear Adapter Can Boost Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08183/) (2026)
- [Synergistic Dual-Branch Adaptation for Multi-modal Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.21446/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Different from the traditional semi-supervised learning paradigm that is constrained by the close-world assumption, Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) presumes that the unlabeled dataset contains new categories not appearing in the labeled set, and aims to not only classify old categories but also discover new categories in the unlabeled data. Existing studies on GCD typically devote to transferring the general knowledge from the self-supervised pretrained model to the target GCD task via some fine-tuning strategies, such as partial tuning and prompt learning. Nevertheless, these fine-tuning methods fail to make a sound balance between the generalization capacity of pretrained backbone and the adaptability to the GCD task. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel adapter-tuning-based method named AdaptGCD, which is the first work to introduce the adapter tuning into the GCD task and provides some key insights expected to enlighten future research. Furthermore, considering the discrepancy of supervision information between the old and new classes, a multi-expert adapter structure equipped with a route assignment constraint is elaborately devised, such that the data from old and new classes are separated into different expert groups. Extensive experiments are conducted on 7 widely-used datasets. The remarkable improvements in performance highlight the effectiveness of our proposals.