# ReLKD: Inter-Class Relation Learning with Knowledge Distillation for Generalized Category Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07229 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07229/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General knowledge distillation methods, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 40 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [General knowledge distillation methods](https://mlsanity.com/distill/general-knowledge-distillation-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (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)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [Paying More Attention to Attention: Improving the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Attention Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03928/) (2016)
- [Relational Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05068/) (2019)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [Be Your Own Teacher: Improve the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks via Self Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08094/) (2019)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)
- [Paraphrasing Complex Network: Network Compression via Factor Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.04977/) (2018)
- [Knowledge Transfer via Distillation of Activation Boundaries Formed by Hidden Neurons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.03233/) (2018)
- [Learning to Discover Novel Visual Categories via Deep Transfer Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09884/) (2019)
- [Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02609/) (2022)
- [MaskCLIP: Masked Self-Distillation Advances Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12262/) (2022)
- [Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03526/) (2021)
- [Learning to cluster in order to transfer across domains and tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10125/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Multi-class Classification without Multi-class Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00544/) (2019)
- [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)
- [SPTNet: An Efficient Alternative Framework for Generalized Category Discovery with Spatial Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13684/) (2024)
- [MetaGCD: Learning to Continually Learn in Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11063/) (2023)
- [OpenLDN: Learning to Discover Novel Classes for Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02261/) (2022)
- [Meta Discovery: Learning to Discover Novel Classes given Very Limited Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04002/) (2021)
- [Active Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04272/) (2024)
- [Solving the Catastrophic Forgetting Problem in Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.05272/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) faces the challenge of categorizing unlabeled data containing both known and novel classes, given only labels for known classes. Previous studies often treat each class independently, neglecting the inherent inter-class relations. Obtaining such inter-class relations directly presents a significant challenge in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose ReLKD, an end-to-end framework that effectively exploits implicit inter-class relations and leverages this knowledge to enhance the classification of novel classes. ReLKD comprises three key modules: a target-grained module for learning discriminative representations, a coarse-grained module for capturing hierarchical class relations, and a distillation module for transferring knowledge from the coarse-grained module to refine the target-grained module's representation learning. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ReLKD, particularly in scenarios with limited labeled data. The code for ReLKD is available at https://github.com/ZhouF-ECNU/ReLKD.