# SIEFormer: Spectral-Interpretable and -Enhanced Transformer for Generalized Category Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13067 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13067/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02907/) (2016)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Inductive Representation Learning on Large Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02216/) (2017)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks on Graphs with Fast Localized Spectral Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09375/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [MixMatch: A Holistic Approach to Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02249/) (2019)
- [Deeper Insights into Graph Convolutional Networks for Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07606/) (2018)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [Predict then Propagate: Graph Neural Networks meet Personalized PageRank](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05997/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Deep Embedding for Clustering Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06335/) (2015)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Graph Transformers with Spectral Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03893/) (2021)
- [Meta Pseudo Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10580/) (2020)
- [Open-Set Recognition: a Good Closed-Set Classifier is All You Need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06207/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Deep Semi-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00550/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CayleyNets: Graph Convolutional Neural Networks with Complex Rational Spectral Filters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07664/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a novel approach, Spectral-Interpretable and -Enhanced Transformer (SIEFormer), which leverages spectral analysis to reinterpret the attention mechanism within Vision Transformer (ViT) and enhance feature adaptability, with particular emphasis on challenging Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) tasks. The proposed SIEFormer is composed of two main branches, each corresponding to an implicit and explicit spectral perspective of the ViT, enabling joint optimization. The implicit branch realizes the use of different types of graph Laplacians to model the local structure correlations of tokens, along with a novel Band-adaptive Filter (BaF) layer that can flexibly perform both band-pass and band-reject filtering. The explicit branch, on the other hand, introduces a Maneuverable Filtering Layer (MFL) that learns global dependencies among tokens by applying the Fourier transform to the input ``value" features, modulating the transformed signal with a set of learnable parameters in the frequency domain, and then performing an inverse Fourier transform to obtain the enhanced features. Extensive experiments reveal state-of-the-art performance on multiple image recognition datasets, reaffirming the superiority of our approach through ablation studies and visualizations.