# Fourier Self-Supervision for Fine-Grained Generalized Category Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08963 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08963/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.09246/) (2016)
- [Deep Clustering for Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05520/) (2018)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Contrastive Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00362/) (2020)
- [FDA: Fourier Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05498/) (2020)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)
- [A Fourier-based Framework for Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11120/) (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)
- [Training behavior of deep neural network in frequency domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.01251/) (2018)
- [Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03526/) (2021)
- [A Unified Objective for Novel Class Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08536/) (2021)
- [Automatically Discovering and Learning New Visual Categories with Ranking Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05714/) (2020)
- [Learning to cluster in order to transfer across domains and tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10125/) (2017)
- [Deep Self-Learning From Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02160/) (2019)
- [An Overview of Deep Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05278/) (2020)
- [Parametric Classification for Generalized Category Discovery: A Baseline Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11727/) (2022)
- [Novel Visual Category Discovery with Dual Ranking Statistics and Mutual Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03358/) (2021)
- [Multi-class Classification without Multi-class Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00544/) (2019)
- [OpenMix: Reviving Known Knowledge for Discovering Novel Visual Categories in An Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05551/) (2020)
- [When Does Contrastive Visual Representation Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05837/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Conceptional Contrastive Learning for Generalized Category Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17393/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalized Category Discovery aims to recognize known categories while identifying novel ones within unlabeled data. Existing methods, typically based on self-supervision and contrastive learning, often struggle to capture fine-grained distinctions, relying on superficial visual cues rather than the intrinsic attributes humans use for categorization. We introduce Fourier Self-Supervision, that leverages the Fourier transform of images to enhance the discrimination of subtle differences and support the discovery of new categories. Our method employs a dual frequency filtering strategy: a low-pass filter first extracts broad, abstract attributes that capture high-level category information, while a high-pass filter emphasizes fine details such as edges and textures that are essential for fine-grained recognition. Each operates on a dedicated latent space, and their overlapping representations together yield a richer, more complete feature space. This dual-frequency approach not only refines feature extraction to identify novel categories, but also strengthens the model's discriminative power in fine-grained category discovery. Experiments on multiple fine-grained datasets show that incorporating Fourier Self-Supervision outperforms state-of-the-art methods, even when the number of classes is unknown, demonstrating its effectiveness for Generalized Category Discovery. Our code is available at: https://github.com/SarahRastegar/FourEx.