# Generalized Category Discovery under Domain Shifts: From Vision to Vision-Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00906 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00906/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 84 of its 113 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07572/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [DINOv3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10104/) (2025)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [How transferable are features in deep neural networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1792/) (2014)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Optimization Methods for Large-Scale Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04838/) (2016)
- [AugMix: A Simple Data Processing Method to Improve Robustness and Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02781/) (2019)
- [Scheduled Sampling for Sequence Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03099/) (2015)
- [Introduction to Online Convex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05207/) (2019)
- [Exact solutions to the nonlinear dynamics of learning in deep linear neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6120/) (2013)
- [Learning to Generalize: Meta-Learning for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03463/) (2017)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to categorize unlabelled instances from both known and unknown classes by transferring knowledge from labelled data of known classes. Existing methods assume all data comes from a single domain, yet real-world unlabelled data often exhibits domain shifts alongside semantic shifts. We study GCD under domain shifts and propose three frameworks that adapt foundation models, ranging from self-supervised vision models to vision-language models. (i) HiLo disentangles domain and semantic features through multi-level feature extraction and mutual information minimization, combined with PatchMix augmentation and curriculum sampling. (ii) HLPrompt extends HiLo with semantic-aware spatial prompt tuning to suppress background and domain noise. (iii) VLPrompt leverages vision-language models via factorized textual prompts and cross-modal consistency regularization. The three methods share core design principles while operating on different foundation backbones, making them suitable for different deployment scenarios. Extensive experiments on synthetic corruptions and real-world multi-domain shifts demonstrate consistent improvements over strong baselines. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/hilo/