# ProtoGCD: Unified and Unbiased Prototype Learning for Generalized Category Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03755 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03755/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 72 of its 95 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 72)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [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)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Understanding Contrastive Representation Learning through Alignment and Uniformity on the Hypersphere](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10242/) (2020)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (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)
- [Using Self-Supervised Learning Can Improve Model Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.12340/) (2019)
- [Pseudo-Labeling and Confirmation Bias in Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02983/) (2019)
- [TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15997/) (2022)
- [Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11132/) (2019)
- [CSI: Novelty Detection via Contrastive Learning on Distributionally Shifted Instances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.08176/) (2020)
- [ViM: Out-Of-Distribution with Virtual-logit Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10807/) (2022)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [Recent Advances in Open Set Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08581/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [VideoTemp-o3: Harmonizing Temporal Grounding and Video Understanding in Agentic Thinking-with-Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07801/) (2026)
- [Consistent Supervised-Unsupervised Alignment for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04725/) (2025)
- [Category Discovery: An Open-World Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22542/) (2025)
- [Open-World Deepfake Attribution via Confidence-Aware Asymmetric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.12667/) (2025)
- [Generalized Category Discovery via Token Manifold Capacity Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14044/) (2025)
- [PartCo: Part-Level Correspondence Priors Enhance Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22769/) (2025)
- [Generalized Fine-Grained Category Discovery with Multi-Granularity Conceptual Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26227/) (2025)
- [ClearGCD: Mitigating Shortcut Learning For Robust Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22892/) (2025)
- [TALON: Test-time Adaptive Learning for On-the-Fly Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08075/) (2026)
- [Seeing Beyond: Extrapolative Domain Adaptive Panoramic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15475/) (2026)
- [Sparsity Hurts: Simple Linear Adapter Can Boost Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08183/) (2026)
- [Long-Tailed Learning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06965/) (2025)
- [LumiCRS: Asymmetric Contrastive Prototype Learning for Long-Tail Conversational Recommender Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04722/) (2025)
- [InfoSculpt: Sculpting the Latent Space for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10098/) (2026)
- [SIEFormer: Spectral-Interpretable and -Enhanced Transformer for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13067/) (2026)
- [FedDAP: Domain-Aware Prototype Learning for Federated Learning under Domain Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06795/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Optical Prior: Spectrum-Guided Knowledge Transfer for SAR Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22174/) (2026)
- [Identifying Latent Concepts and Structures for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00620/) (2026)
- [Face-Trace: Open-Set Attribution and Progressive Discovery of Synthetic Face Generators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.07545/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized category discovery (GCD) is a pragmatic but underexplored problem, which requires models to automatically cluster and discover novel categories by leveraging the labeled samples from old classes. The challenge is that unlabeled data contain both old and new classes. Early works leveraging pseudo-labeling with parametric classifiers handle old and new classes separately, which brings about imbalanced accuracy between them. Recent methods employing contrastive learning neglect potential positives and are decoupled from the clustering objective, leading to biased representations and sub-optimal results. To address these issues, we introduce a unified and unbiased prototype learning framework, namely ProtoGCD, wherein old and new classes are modeled with joint prototypes and unified learning objectives, {enabling unified modeling between old and new classes}. Specifically, we propose a dual-level adaptive pseudo-labeling mechanism to mitigate confirmation bias, together with two regularization terms to collectively help learn more suitable representations for GCD. Moreover, for practical considerations, we devise a criterion to estimate the number of new classes. Furthermore, we extend ProtoGCD to detect unseen outliers, achieving task-level unification. Comprehensive experiments show that ProtoGCD achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/mashijie1028/ProtoGCD.