# Hyperbolic Category Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06120 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06120/

## Key facts

- Cited by 20 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (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)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Poincar'e Embeddings for Learning Hierarchical Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08039/) (2017)
- [Hyperbolic Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09112/) (2018)
- [Hyperbolic Graph Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12933/) (2019)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.12892/) (2019)
- [Learning to Discover Novel Visual Categories via Deep Transfer Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09884/) (2019)
- [Hyperbolic Image Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02239/) (2019)
- [Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02609/) (2022)
- [Riemannian Adaptive Optimization Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.00760/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Automatically Discovering and Learning New Visual Categories with Ranking Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05714/) (2020)
- [Hyperbolic Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09786/) (2018)
- [Neighborhood Contrastive Learning for Novel Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10731/) (2021)
- [AutoNovel: Automatically Discovering and Learning Novel Visual Categories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15252/) (2021)
- [Parametric Classification for Generalized Category Discovery: A Baseline Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11727/) (2022)
- [Hyperbolic Vision Transformers: Combining Improvements in Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10833/) (2022)
- [Fully Hyperbolic Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14686/) (2021)
- [Novel Visual Category Discovery with Dual Ranking Statistics and Mutual Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03358/) (2021)
- [Hyperbolic Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05898/) (2022)
- [Dynamic Conceptional Contrastive Learning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17393/) (2023)
- [PromptCAL: Contrastive Affinity Learning via Auxiliary Prompts for Generalized Novel Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05590/) (2022)
- [Learning Semi-supervised Gaussian Mixture Models for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06144/) (2023)
- [No Representation Rules Them All in Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17055/) (2023)
- [Clipped Hyperbolic Classifiers Are Super-Hyperbolic Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11472/) (2021)
- [Joint Representation Learning and Novel Category Discovery on Single- and Multi-modal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12673/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [SEAL: Semantic-Aware Hierarchical Learning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18740/) (2025)
- [Category Discovery: An Open-World Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22542/) (2025)
- [Hyperbolic Busemann Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18858/) (2026)
- [HyperPath: Knowledge-Guided Hyperbolic Semantic Hierarchy Modeling for WSI Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16398/) (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)
- [HIDISC: A Hyperbolic Framework for Domain Generalization with Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17188/) (2025)
- [HypCBC: Domain-Invariant Hyperbolic Cross-Branch Consistency for Generalizable Medical Image Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03264/) (2026)
- [Spectral Contraction of Boundary-Weighted Filters on delta-Hyperbolic Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15464/) (2025)
- [H3Former: Hypergraph-based Semantic-Aware Aggregation via Hyperbolic Hierarchical Contrastive Loss for Fine-Grained Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10260/) (2025)
- [InfoSculpt: Sculpting the Latent Space for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10098/) (2026)
- [Comparing Euclidean and Hyperbolic K-Means for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04932/) (2026)
- [Multi-Modal Representation Learning via Semi-Supervised Rate Reduction for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19910/) (2026)
- [LA-Sign: Looped Transformers with Geometry-aware Alignment for Skeleton-based Sign Language Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29057/) (2026)
- [The Devil Is in Gradient Entanglement: Energy-Aware Gradient Coordinator for Robust Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14176/) (2026)
- [OmniGCD: Abstracting Generalized Category Discovery for Modality Agnosticism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14762/) (2026)
- [Unlocking Optical Prior: Spectrum-Guided Knowledge Transfer for SAR Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22174/) (2026)
- [Generalized Category Discovery under Domain Shifts: From Vision to Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00906/) (2026)
- [CloSeR: Unified Relational Distillation from Closed-Set Teachers for Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25692/) (2026)
- [Generalized Biomedicine Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00120/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is an intriguing open-world problem that has garnered increasing attention. Given a dataset that includes both labelled and unlabelled images, GCD aims to categorize all images in the unlabelled subset, regardless of whether they belong to known or unknown classes. In GCD, the common practice typically involves applying a spherical projection operator at the end of the self-supervised pretrained backbone, operating within Euclidean or spherical space. However, both of these spaces have been shown to be suboptimal for encoding samples that possesses hierarchical structures. In contrast, hyperbolic space exhibits exponential volume growth relative to radius, making it inherently strong at capturing the hierarchical structure of samples from both seen and unseen categories. Therefore, we propose to tackle the category discovery challenge in the hyperbolic space. We introduce HypCD, a simple underlineHyperbolic framework for learning hierarchy-aware representations and classifiers for generalized underlineCategory underlineDiscovery. HypCD first transforms the Euclidean embedding space of the backbone network into hyperbolic space, facilitating subsequent representation and classification learning by considering both hyperbolic distance and the angle between samples. This approach is particularly helpful for knowledge transfer from known to unknown categories in GCD. We thoroughly evaluate HypCD on public GCD benchmarks, by applying it to various baseline and state-of-the-art methods, consistently achieving significant improvements.