FOCUS: Bridging Fine-Grained Recognition and Open-World Discovery across Domains

We introduce the first unified framework for *Fine-Grained Domain-Generalized Generalized Category Discovery* (FG-DG-GCD), bringing open-world recognition closer to real-world deployment under domain shift. Unlike conventional GCD, which assumes labeled and unlabeled data come from the same distribution, DG-GCD learns only from labeled source data and must both recognize known classes and discover novel ones in unseen, unlabeled target domains. This problem is especially challenging in fine-grained settings, where subtle inter-class differences and large intra-class variation make domain generalization significantly harder. To support systematic evaluation, we establish the first *FG-DG-GCD benchmarks* by creating identity-preserving *painting* and *sketch* domains for CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, and FGVC-Aircraft using controlled diffusion-adapter stylization. On top of this ,we propose FoCUS, a single-stage framework that combines *Domain-Consistent Parts Discovery* (DCPD) for geometry-stable part reasoning with *Uncertainty-Aware Feature Augmentation* (UFA) for confidence-calibrated feature regularization through uncertainty-guided perturbations. Extensive experiments show that FoCUS outperforms strong GCD, FG-GCD, and DG-GCD baselines by **3.28%**, **9.68%**, and **2.07%**, respectively, in clustering accuracy on the proposed benchmarks. It also remains competitive on coarse-grained DG-GCD tasks while achieving nearly **3x** higher computational efficiency than the current state of the art. ^[Code and datasets will be released upon acceptance.]

When Domain Generalization meets Generalized Category Discovery: An Adaptive Task-Arithmetic Driven Approach

Generalized Class Discovery (GCD) clusters base and novel classes in a target domain using supervision from a source domain with only base classes. Current methods often falter with distribution shifts and typically require access to target data during training, which can sometimes be impractical. To address this issue, we introduce the novel paradigm of Domain Generalization in GCD (DG-GCD), where only source data is available for training, while the target domain, with a distinct data distribution, remains unseen until inference. To this end, our solution, DG2CD-Net, aims to construct a domain-independent, discriminative embedding space for GCD. The core innovation is an episodic training strategy that enhances cross-domain generalization by adapting a base model on tasks derived from source and synthetic domains generated by a foundation model. Each episode focuses on a cross-domain GCD task, diversifying task setups over episodes and combining open-set domain adaptation with a novel margin loss and representation learning for optimizing the feature space progressively. To capture the effects of fine-tuning on the base model, we extend task arithmetic by adaptively weighting the local task vectors concerning the fine-tuned models based on their GCD performance on a validation distribution. This episodic update mechanism boosts the adaptability of the base model to unseen targets. Experiments across three datasets confirm that DG2CD-Net outperforms existing GCD methods customized for DG-GCD.