材料发现

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to transfer knowledge from known categories to automatically discover new, unseen ones while preserving recognition of the known classes. Despite recent progress, existing GCD approaches typically assume that all data are drawn from the same distribution, which is rarely valid in real-world scenarios. In practice, data often experience simultaneous domain shifts and novel category emergence, causing severe performance degradation of existing systems. To address this challenge, we propose CausalGCD, a causality-inspired framework designed to mitigate domain-shift bias in category discovery. Specifically, we first analyze the causal graph to uncover the relationships among key variables in cross-domain GCD. We then introduce the concept of causal dependency risk and propose a Causal Dependency Risk Estimator to capture causal semantics, further deriving a theoretically computable upper bound to optimize this risk under cross-domain GCD settings. Furthermore, we propose a Causal Geometric Manifold Constraint that enforces invariant manifold-level associations between known and unknown categories across domains, thereby facilitating robust discovery of novel classes. Extensive experiments on the SSB-C and DomainNet benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of CausalGCD and highlight the significance of causal reasoning in open-world category discovery.

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.

In safety-critical industrial applications, accurately identifying causal relationships and quantifying uncertainty is essential for tasks such as root cause analysis, feature selection, and process optimization. Traditional causal discovery methods inadequately handle nonlinearities and complex uncertainties prevalent in industrial sensor data. To address this, we introduce a novel causal discovery framework that integrates Polynomial Chaos Expansion (PCE) representations of stochastic noise into structural equations. This method effectively captures complex nonlinear couplings and arbitrary noise distributions characteristic of industrial data. We rigorously prove the identifiability of causal structures under mild sparsity conditions on the chaos coefficients, extending linear non-Gaussian acyclic model (LiNGAM) identifiability results. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior accuracy, robustness under non-Gaussian noise conditions, and practical uncertainty quantification. This framework presents a principled, interpretable, and computationally feasible approach to causal analysis in nonlinear uncertain industrial environments.

Continual Generalized Category Discovery (C-GCD) seeks to incrementally discover new categories from unlabeled data and memorize old categories' knowledge, fostering model adaptability in real-world scenarios. Especially, the unlabeled data is from both old and new classes, requiring the model to recognize previously learned classes while discovering. In response, recent efforts focus on devising specific frameworks and various anti-forgetting strategies, striving for a typical stability-plasticity trade-off. Unlike previous studies, in this work, we first revisit these methods and identify that most of these methods over-protect old classes, hampering the accurate discovery of novel ones. To address this challenge, we introduce the Decouple Your Discovery and Memory (DYDM), a dual-branch architecture that decouples the discovery of new classes and the memorization of old classes. The discovery branch is focused on accurately recognizing new classes, while the memory branch consolidates all identified categories in a recursive manner and functions as the inference branch. Importantly, benefiting from the strong knowledge retention ability of the memory branch, the discovery branch can facilitate the recognition of novel classes from the unlabeled data, achieving a win-win outcome between plasticity and stability. Extensive experiments on various datasets and settings demonstrate the superiority of our approach, achieving leads of up to 9.87%, 7.30%, 3.18%, and 8.25%. Furthermore, our framework can integrate with existing approaches, consistently enhancing their performance.

For an unlabeled dataset containing both known and unknown categories, Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify known categories while discovering unknown ones. Although existing methods achieve promising results on coarse-grained datasets, they struggle in fine-grained scenarios. We observe that attention artifacts where attention maps exhibit abnormally high responses on a few tokens--significantly interfere with fine-grained GCD by causing the model to overemphasize global semantics and overlook discriminative local cues. To address this issue, we propose the Token-Aware Refinement (TAR) framework, a plug-and-play module that mitigates attention artifacts and enhances local information. Unlike conventional approaches that rely solely on the first token for classification, TAR leverages the entire token sequence to better capture fine-grained details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TAR consistently improves performance across multiple benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/VectorYangYiStar/TAR.

Conventional evaluation methods for multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) lack interpretability and are often insufficient to fully disclose significant capability gaps across models. To address this, we introduce AuditDM, an automated framework that actively discovers and rectifies MLLM failure modes by auditing their divergence. AuditDM fine-tunes an MLLM as an auditor via reinforcement learning to generate challenging questions and counterfactual images that maximize disagreement among target models. Once trained, the auditor uncovers diverse, interpretable exemplars that reveal model weaknesses and serve as annotation-free data for rectification. When applied to SoTA models like Gemma-3 and PaliGemma-2, AuditDM discovers more than 20 distinct failure types. Fine-tuning on these discoveries consistently improves all models across 16 benchmarks, and enables a 3B model to surpass its 28B counterpart. Our results suggest that as data scaling hits diminishing returns, targeted model auditing offers an effective path to model diagnosis and improvement.