arXiv:2604.11484cs.CV2026-04

提出动态决策框架PACO,让模型在识别旧类时自动发现新类并持续优化分类边界。

PACO: Proxy-Task Alignment and Online Calibration for On-the-Fly Category Discovery

  • 构建树状推理结构,分步判断样本是否属于已知类、匹配现有新类或创建新类
  • 通过在线校准阈值,在7个基准上超越当前最优方法,提升显著
  • 无需重新训练,可直接嵌入现有流程,适合实时增量学习场景

在线类别发现(OCD)要求模型在离线支持集训练后,从在线数据流中识别已知类别并发现新类别。现有方法过度依赖离线训练,旨在学习判别性表征以在测试时分离新类别,但其推理阶段通常仅用单一阈值判定。我们指出这一范式存在根本缺陷:OCD并非静态分类问题,而是动态过程。模型需持续决策:1)样本是否属于已知类;2)是否匹配现有新类别;3)是否应创建新类别。此外,先前方法将支持集视为固定知识,未随推理过程中新证据更新决策边界,导致类别形成不稳定且不一致。实验验证了此问题。通过合理校准与自适应阈值,即使不改变表征也能实现显著提升。为此,我们提出PACO——一种支持集校准的树状结构在线决策框架。该框架将推理建模为一系列层次化决策,包括已知类路由、出生感知的新类别分配,以及对动态原型记忆的“附着”或“创建”操作。此外,我们模拟代理发现过程,在离线训练期间初始化阈值以对齐推理阶段。推理时通过成熟的新型原型持续更新阈值。关键在于,PACO无需复杂训练,也无需数据集特定调参,可作为推理模块直接集成至现有OCD流程。大量实验表明,PACO在七个基准上均显著优于当前最优基线。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

On-the-Fly Category Discovery (OCD) requires a model, trained on an offline support set, to recognize known classes while discovering new ones from an online streaming sequence. Existing methods focus heavily on offline training. They aim to learn discriminative representations on the support set so that novel classes can be separated at test time. However, their discovery mechanism at inference is typically reduced to a single threshold. We argue that this paradigm is fundamentally flawed as OCD is not a static classification problem, but a dynamic process. The model must continuously decide 1) whether a sample belongs to a known class, 2) matches an existing novel category, or 3) should initiate a new one. Moreover, prior methods treat the support set as fixed knowledge. They do not update their decision boundaries as new evidence arrives during inference. This leads to unstable and inconsistent category formation. Our experiments confirm these issues. With properly calibrated and adaptive thresholds, substantial improvements can be achieved, even without changing the representation. Motivated by this, we propose PACO, a support-set-calibrated, tree-structured online decision framework. The framework models inference as a sequence of hierarchical decisions, including known-class routing, birth-aware novel assignment, and attach-versus-create operations over a dynamic prototype memory. Furthermore, we simulate the proxy discovery process to initialize the thresholds during offline training to align with inference. Thresholds are continuously updated during inference using mature novel prototypes. Importantly, PACO requires no heavy training and no dataset-specific tuning. It can be directly integrated into existing OCD pipelines as an inference-time module. Extensive experiments show significant improvements over SOTA baselines across seven benchmarks.

在线发现动态分类原型记忆阈值校准

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