Collaborative Cloud-edge Generalized Category Discovery

Generalized category discovery (GCD) aims to group unlabeled samples from known and unknown classes when only part of the labeled data in the known classes is given. It allows the model to adapt to dynamic environments by discovering novel categories. However, when we applied the GCD approach to the decentralized open world, we still encountered the following challenges: (1) none of labeled data easily obtained in the open world, (2) heterogeneous label spaces across different environments, (3)representation degradation caused by fine-tuning models with limited data in specific environments. To address the above challenges, we introduce a new and practical task, namely Cloud-edge GCD (CE-GCD). Different from semi-supervised GCD, CE-GCD assumes that we only have a base model trained on common public categories, and aims to perform personalized unsupervised novel category discovery in multiple environments with heterogeneous label spaces. Data from different environments or clients cannot be shared, only model parameters can be transferred. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel GCD framework based on energy-guided known class discrimination and multi-level contrastive learning. In each client, we first use the classifier of the base model to distinguish between known and unknown classes, and then perform unsupervised learning on the unknown classes. Each client transfers category information through prototypes to assist learning. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.