Open Ad-hoc Categorization with Contextualized Feature Learning

Adaptive categorization of visual scenes is essential for AI agents to handle changing tasks. Unlike fixed common categories for plants or animals, ad-hoc categories are created dynamically to serve specific goals. We study open ad-hoc categorization: Given a few labeled exemplars and abundant unlabeled data, the goal is to discover the underlying context and to expand ad-hoc categories through semantic extension and visual clustering around it. Building on the insight that ad-hoc and common categories rely on similar perceptual mechanisms, we propose OAK, a simple model that introduces a small set of learnable context tokens at the input of a frozen CLIP and optimizes with both CLIP's image-text alignment objective and GCD's visual clustering objective. On Stanford and Clevr-4 datasets, OAK achieves state-of-the-art in accuracy and concept discovery across multiple categorizations, including 87.4% novel accuracy on Stanford Mood, surpassing CLIP and GCD by over 50%. Moreover, OAK produces interpretable saliency maps, focusing on hands for Action, faces for Mood, and backgrounds for Location, promoting transparency and trust while enabling adaptive and generalizable categorization.