This work addresses the task of generalized class discovery (GCD) in instance segmentation. The goal is to discover novel classes and obtain a model capable of segmenting instances of both known and novel categories, given labeled and unlabeled data. Since the real world contains numerous objects with long-tailed distributions, the instance distribution for each class is inherently imbalanced. To address the imbalanced distributions, we propose an instance-wise temperature assignment (ITA) method for contrastive learning and class-wise reliability criteria for pseudo-labels. The ITA method relaxes instance discrimination for samples belonging to head classes to enhance GCD. The reliability criteria are to avoid excluding most pseudo-labels for tail classes when training an instance segmentation network using pseudo-labels from GCD. Additionally, we propose dynamically adjusting the criteria to leverage diverse samples in the early stages while relying only on reliable pseudo-labels in the later stages. We also introduce an efficient soft attention module to encode object-specific representations for GCD. Finally, we evaluate our proposed method by conducting experiments on two settings: COCO + LVIS and LVIS + Visual Genome. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
View on arXiv@article{hoang2025_2502.08149,
title={ Generalized Class Discovery in Instance Segmentation },
author={ Cuong Manh Hoang and Yeejin Lee and Byeongkeun Kang },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.08149},
year={ 2025 }
}