DP-BOA: Dirichlet-Process Birth-or-Assign for On-the-Fly Category Discovery

On-the-fly category discovery requires deciding for each incoming test sample whether to assign it to an existing category or spawn a new one. Existing methods typically implement this decision through matching-based heuristics, such as radius- or hash-based rules. While effective in practice, these methods usually treat category birth implicitly as a fallback when no existing category matches confidently, rather than as an explicit alternative supported by its own statistical evidence. To address this, we propose DP-BOA, a posterior-predictive decision framework based on an online Dirichlet-process Gaussian mixture model with a Normal-Inverse-Wishart prior. During training, we use labeled data to calibrate a shared NIW prior over category Gaussians and warm-start the known-category posteriors. At test time, for each incoming sample, DP-BOA compares the posterior predictive evidence for assignment to existing categories against the evidence for spawning a new category induced by the DP prior, and then updates category statistics online after the decision. The method captures anisotropic category geometry and naturally adapts decision confidence as evidence accumulates. Across standard OCD benchmarks, DP-BOA consistently outperforms strong baselines and delivers particularly strong novel-class discovery performance while maintaining competitive known-class accuracy.