# GLEAN: Active Generalized Category Discovery with Diverse LLM Feedback

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18414 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18414/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [Deep Batch Active Learning by Diverse, Uncertain Gradient Lower Bounds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.03671/) (2019)
- [A Survey of Deep Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.00236/) (2020)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (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)
- [FewRel: A Large-Scale Supervised Few-Shot Relation Classification Dataset with State-of-the-Art Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10147/) (2018)
- [Contextual Diversity for Active Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.05723/) (2020)
- [Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Novel Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10731/) (2021)
- [Parametric Classification for Generalized Category Discovery: A Baseline Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11727/) (2022)
- [OpenMix: Reviving Known Knowledge for Discovering Novel Visual Categories in An Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05551/) (2020)
- [ClusterLLM: Large Language Models as a Guide for Text Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14871/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Generalized Category Discovery with Decoupled Prototypical Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15115/) (2022)
- [Improving Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01918/) (2023)
- [New Intent Discovery with Pre-training and Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12914/) (2022)
- [OntoED: Low-resource Event Detection with Ontology Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10922/) (2021)
- [IDAS: Intent Discovery with Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19783/) (2023)
- [ImplicitAVE: An Open-Source Dataset and Multimodal LLMs Benchmark for Implicit Attribute Value Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.15592/) (2024)
- [JointMatch: A Unified Approach for Diverse and Collaborative Pseudo-Labeling to Semi-Supervised Text Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14583/) (2023)
- [Generalized Category Discovery with Large Language Models in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10897/) (2023)
- [EIVEN: Efficient Implicit Attribute Value Extraction using Multimodal LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08886/) (2024)
- [DeCrisisMB: Debiased Semi-Supervised Learning for Crisis Tweet Classification via Memory Bank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14577/) (2023)
- [Pre-training Intent-Aware Encoders for Zero- and Few-Shot Intent Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14827/) (2023)
- [RSVP: Customer Intent Detection via Agent Response Contrastive and Generative Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09773/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Scaling Laws for Many-Shot In-Context Learning with Self-Generated Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03062/) (2025)
- [TestNUC: Enhancing Test-Time Computing Approaches and Scaling through Neighboring Unlabeled Data Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.19163/) (2025)
- [LLMs Enable Bag-of-Texts Representations for Short-Text Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06747/) (2025)
- [Generalized Category Discovery in Event-Centric Contexts: Latent Pattern Mining with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23304/) (2025)
- [Lifelong Evolution: Collaborative Learning between Large and Small Language Models for Continuous Emergent Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04739/) (2025)
- [OmniGCD: Abstracting Generalized Category Discovery for Modality Agnosticism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14762/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a practical and challenging open-world task that aims to recognize both known and novel categories in unlabeled data using limited labeled data from known categories. Due to the lack of supervision, previous GCD methods face significant challenges, such as difficulty in rectifying errors for confusing instances, and inability to effectively uncover and leverage the semantic meanings of discovered clusters. Therefore, additional annotations are usually required for real-world applicability. However, human annotation is extremely costly and inefficient. To address these issues, we propose GLEAN, a unified framework for generalized category discovery that actively learns from diverse and collaborative LLM feedback. Our approach leverages three different types of LLM feedback to: (1) improve instance-level contrastive features, (2) generate category descriptions, and (3) align uncertain instances with LLM-selected category descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of GLEAN over state-of-the-art models across diverse datasets, metrics, and supervision settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/Glean.