Relational Semantic Grounding for Test-Time Discovery

Tianle Liu, Gongbo Cheng, Chenggong Ni, Minming Gu, Tao Zhou +2

Test-Time Discovery (TTD) aims to recognize known classes and detect novel ones from a continuous unlabeled test stream after deployment. Existing TTD methods mainly rely on visual clustering or prototype comparison, and can only assign anonymous labels to discovered classes, leaving them difficult to interpret in open-world applications. In this paper, we propose SEGA, a Semantic Grounding with Attributes framework for TTD. SEGA leverages large language models to generate attribute-rich descriptions for known classes and constructs an attribute-anchored visual-semantic space during training. At test time, we introduce Relational Semantic Grounding (RSG), which grounds unknown samples with similar and dissimilar known-class anchors, prompts the LLM to generate candidate concepts, and reranks them in the learned semantic space. The selected concept is further used for confidence-guided test-time semantic stabilization. By coupling attribute-level semantic alignment with relational concept grounding, SEGA transforms anonymous test-time clusters into interpretable semantic concepts. Experiments show that SEGA improves TTD baselines with the promise of semantic grounding for…