Abstract:Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) seeks to uncover novel categories in unlabeled data while preserving recognition of known categories, yet prevailing visual-only pipelines and the loose coupling between supervised learning and discovery often yield brittle boundaries on fine-grained, look-alike categories. We introduce the Analogical Textual Concept Generator (ATCG), a plug-and-play module that analogizes from labeled knowledge to new observations, forming textual concepts for unlabeled samples. Fusing these analogical textual concepts with visual features turns discovery into a visual-textual reasoning process, transferring prior knowledge to novel data and sharpening category separation. ATCG attaches to both parametric and clustering style GCD pipelines and requires no changes to their overall design. Across six benchmarks, ATCG consistently improves overall, known-class, and novel-class performance, with the largest gains on fine-grained data. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zhou-9527/AnaLogical-GCD.
Abstract:Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to navigate photo-realistic environments following natural language instructions. Current methods predominantly rely on imitation learning, which suffers from limited generalization and poor robustness to execution perturbations. We present NavGRPO, a reinforcement learning framework that learns goal-directed navigation policies through Group Relative Policy Optimization. By exploring diverse trajectories and optimizing via within-group performance comparisons, our method enables agents to distinguish effective strategies beyond expert paths without requiring additional value networks. Built on ScaleVLN, NavGRPO achieves superior robustness on R2R and REVERIE benchmarks with +3.0% and +1.71% SPL improvements in unseen environments. Under extreme early-stage perturbations, we demonstrate +14.89% SPL gain over the baseline, confirming that goal-directed RL training builds substantially more robust navigation policies. Code and models will be released.
Abstract:Continual Generalized Category Discovery (C-GCD) requires identifying novel classes from unlabeled data while retaining knowledge of known classes over time. Existing methods typically update classifier weights dynamically, resulting in forgetting and inconsistent feature alignment. We propose GOAL, a unified framework that introduces a fixed Equiangular Tight Frame (ETF) classifier to impose a consistent geometric structure throughout learning. GOAL conducts supervised alignment for labeled samples and confidence-guided alignment for novel samples, enabling stable integration of new classes without disrupting old ones. Experiments on four benchmarks show that GOAL outperforms the prior method Happy, reducing forgetting by 16.1% and boosting novel class discovery by 3.2%, establishing a strong solution for long-horizon continual discovery.
Abstract:Prompt-based continual learning methods effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, most existing methods assign a fixed set of prompts to each task, completely isolating knowledge across tasks and resulting in suboptimal parameter utilization. To address this, we consider the practical needs of continual learning and propose a prompt-sharing framework. This framework constructs a global prompt pool and introduces a task-aware gated routing mechanism that sparsely activates a subset of prompts to achieve dynamic decoupling and collaborative optimization of task-specific feature representations. Furthermore, we introduce a history-aware modulator that leverages cumulative prompt activation statistics to protect frequently used prompts from excessive updates, thereby mitigating inefficient parameter usage and knowledge forgetting. Extensive analysis and empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing static allocation strategies in effectiveness and efficiency.
Abstract:Multi-label Class-Incremental Learning aims to continuously recognize novel categories in complex scenes where multiple objects co-occur. However, existing approaches often incur high computational costs due to full-parameter fine-tuning and substantial storage overhead from memory buffers, or they struggle to address feature confusion and domain discrepancies adequately. To overcome these limitations, we introduce P2L-CA, a parameter-efficient framework that integrates a Prompt-to-Label module with a Continuous Adapter module. The P2L module leverages class-specific prompts to disentangle multi-label representations while incorporating linguistic priors to enforce stable semantic-visual alignment. Meanwhile, the CA module employs lightweight adapters to mitigate domain gaps between pre-trained models and downstream tasks, thereby enhancing model plasticity. Extensive experiments across standard and challenging MLCIL settings on MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC show that P2L-CA not only achieves substantial improvements over state-of-the-art methods but also demonstrates strong generalization in CIL scenarios, all while requiring minimal trainable parameters and eliminating the need for memory buffers.
Abstract:Deep neural networks (DNNs) often underperform in real-world, dynamic settings where data distributions change over time. Domain Incremental Learning (DIL) offers a solution by enabling continual model adaptation, with Parameter-Isolation DIL (PIDIL) emerging as a promising paradigm to reduce knowledge conflicts. However, existing PIDIL methods struggle with parameter selection accuracy, especially as the number of domains and corresponding classes grows. To address this, we propose SOYO, a lightweight framework that improves domain selection in PIDIL. SOYO introduces a Gaussian Mixture Compressor (GMC) and Domain Feature Resampler (DFR) to store and balance prior domain data efficiently, while a Multi-level Domain Feature Fusion Network (MDFN) enhances domain feature extraction. Our framework supports multiple Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods and is validated across tasks such as image classification, object detection, and speech enhancement. Experimental results on six benchmarks demonstrate SOYO's consistent superiority over existing baselines, showcasing its robustness and adaptability in complex, evolving environments. The codes will be released in https://github.com/qwangcv/SOYO.
Abstract:This study aims to address the problem of multi-domain task incremental learning~(MTIL), which requires that vision-language models~(VLMs) continuously acquire new knowledge while maintaining their inherent zero-shot recognition capability. Existing paradigms delegate the testing of unseen-domain samples to the original CLIP, which only prevents the degradation of the model's zero-shot capability but fails to enhance the generalization of the VLM further. To this end, we propose a novel MTIL framework, named AFA, which comprises two core modules: (1) an against forward-forgetting adapter that learns task-invariant information for each dataset in the incremental tasks to enhance the zero-shot recognition ability of VLMs; (2) an against backward-forgetting adapter that strengthens the few-shot learning capability of VLMs while supporting incremental learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the AFA method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, especially in few-shot MTIL tasks, and surpasses the inherent zero-shot performance of CLIP in terms of transferability. The code is provided in the Supplementary Material.
Abstract:Few-shot class-incremental Learning (FSCIL) enables models to learn new classes from limited data while retaining performance on previously learned classes. Traditional FSCIL methods often require fine-tuning parameters with limited new class data and suffer from a separation between learning new classes and utilizing old knowledge. Inspired by the analogical learning mechanisms of the human brain, we propose a novel analogical generative method. Our approach includes the Brain-Inspired Analogical Generator (BiAG), which derives new class weights from existing classes without parameter fine-tuning during incremental stages. BiAG consists of three components: Weight Self-Attention Module (WSA), Weight & Prototype Analogical Attention Module (WPAA), and Semantic Conversion Module (SCM). SCM uses Neural Collapse theory for semantic conversion, WSA supplements new class weights, and WPAA computes analogies to generate new class weights. Experiments on miniImageNet, CUB-200, and CIFAR-100 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves higher final and average accuracy compared to SOTA methods.
Abstract:Prompt tuning can further enhance the performance of visual-language models across various downstream tasks (e.g., few-shot learning), enabling them to better adapt to specific applications and needs. In this paper, we present a Diversity Covariance-Aware framework that learns distributional information from the data to enhance the few-shot ability of the prompt model. First, we propose a covariance-aware method that models the covariance relationships between visual features and uses anisotropic Mahalanobis distance, instead of the suboptimal cosine distance, to measure the similarity between two modalities. We rigorously derive and prove the validity of this modeling process. Then, we propose the diversity-aware method, which learns multiple diverse soft prompts to capture different attributes of categories and aligns them independently with visual modalities. This method achieves multi-centered covariance modeling, leading to more diverse decision boundaries. Extensive experiments on 11 datasets in various tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Abstract:With the development of visual-language models (VLM) in downstream task applications, test-time adaptation methods based on VLM have attracted increasing attention for their ability to address changes distribution in test-time. Although prior approaches have achieved some progress, they typically either demand substantial computational resources or are constrained by the limitations of the original feature space, rendering them less effective for test-time adaptation tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a training-free feature space rotation with basis transformation for test-time adaptation. By leveraging the inherent distinctions among classes, we reconstruct the original feature space and map it to a new representation, thereby enhancing the clarity of class differences and providing more effective guidance for the model during testing. Additionally, to better capture relevant information from various classes, we maintain a dynamic queue to store representative samples. Experimental results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of both performance and efficiency.