Open-Set Recognition

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Overview

Open-set recognition studies how models can classify known categories without forcing unfamiliar inputs into those categories, a need in settings such as medical diagnosis, security, and ecological monitoring. Common approaches use calibrated confidence, energy or distance scores, metric learning and prototypes; newer systems also use vision-language models, retrieval, and explicit negative examples. Work spans images, video, audio, text, biometrics, and object detection, with methods for rejecting unknowns as well as discovering and learning new classes. A central challenge is balancing accurate known-class predictions with reliable rejection under domain shift, while calibrating thresholds and evaluating them without access to representative unknown data.

Latest papers

CardsList

69 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, up 50% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. OpenStripe supports open-set identification and spatial stripe profiling in wild Amur tigers

    Oct 23, 2026Yichun Peng, Yansong Li, Jin Hou +9Animal Re-IdentificationOpen-Set Recognition

    School of Statistics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China · Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Biodiversity Science and Ecology Engineering, College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China · National Forestry and Grassland Administration Key Laboratory for Conservation Ecology of Northeast Tiger and Leopard, Beijing, China +2

  2. VX-One: Typed, Calibrated Decision Heads for Real-Time Perimeter Triage

    Oct 21, 2026Juan S. SantillanaNetwork Intrusion DetectionProbability Calibration

    Independent research

  3. Does Personalization Break Trust? Open-Set Rejection Calibration Under Few-Shot On-Device Intent Adaptation

    Oct 12, 2026Vaibhav Prajapati, Pushp GargOpen-Set RecognitionOOD Detection

    University of Technology Nuremberg, Nuremberg, Germany · Indian Institute of Information Sri City, Chittoor, India

  4. RSAJEV: Training-Free Abstaining Prototype Memory for Eliminating Silent Hallucination in JEV-Based Remote Sensing Classification

    Oct 11, 2026Man Chen, Antai Chen, Shuai Xu +5Remote Sensing Scene ClassificationVLM Hallucination Mitigation

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan 232001, Anhui, China, and also with the School of Electrical Automation and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China, and the State Key Laboratory of Digital Intelligent Technology for Unmanned Coal Mining, Huainan 232001, Anhui, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan 232001, Anhui, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Anhui University of Science and Technology, Huainan 232001, Anhui, China, and also with the State Key Laboratory of Digital Intelligent Technology for Unmanned Coal Mining, Huainan 232001, Anhui, China +1

  5. CUBE: Class-conditioned Unknown Boundary Evidence for Open-Set Insect Species Recognition

    Oct 9, 2026Hao Tan, Qimin Zhang, Zhe Xiao +3Open-Set RecognitionFine-Grained Image Classification

    Guangdong University of Technology · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University +1

  6. Knowing Whether, Not Just Where: Anchor-Probing Distillation for Open-Set Remote Sensing Visual Grounding

    Oct 9, 2026Zhihao Chang, Lei Zhai, Shuyuan Yang +1Visual GroundingRemote Sensing Visual Grounding

  7. QC-MI-OVSEL: Benchmarking Query-Conditioned Multi-Instance Open-Vocabulary Sound Event Localization

    Oct 9, 2026Yongqiang Chen, Peiwei Chang, Yuelan Cheng +2Audio UnderstandingSpatial Audio

    Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing, University of Surrey, UK

  8. SmoothOperator: Enhancing Representations for Fine-grained Open-set Recognition via Modulated Label Smoothing

    Oct 1, 2026Thiru Thillai Nadarasar Bahavan, Yu Xia, Sachith Seneviratne +1Soft-Label LearningOpen-Set Recognition

    The University of Melbourne Parkville, VIC, Australia

  9. Mixed-Prior Decision Risk for Open-Set Recognition

    Sep 28, 2026L. A. Erlygin, P. D. Proskura, A. A. ZaytsevSelective PredictionOpen-Set Recognition

    Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech), Moscow, Russia · Risk Management, Sber, Moscow, Russia · The Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IITP RAS), Moscow, Russia

  10. Re:Cognize -- A Framework For Open-Set Comic Character Re-Identification

    Sep 27, 2026Aaditya Baranwal, Madhav Kataria, Yogesh S Rawat +1Self-TrainingOpen-Set Recognition

    Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

  11. Interpretable Multi-Hypersphere Deep Anomaly Detection for Open-set Supervised Anomaly Detection

    Sep 19, 2026Zhiji Yang, Fangyong Wang, Yue Li +2Semi-Supervised Anomaly DetectionAnomaly Detection

    School of Statistics and Mathematics, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, 650221, China · Beijing National Center for Applied Mathematics, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100048, China

  12. Scout: Open-World Species Recognition on the Edge

    Sep 19, 2026Mohammad Mehdi Rastikerdar, Hui Guan, Deepak GanesanEdge MLOpen-Set Recognition

    University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA 01003, USA

  13. Cross-Dataset Transfer and Unknown-Class Detection in Imbalanced SAR Ship Classification

    Sep 15, 2026Ch Muhammad Awais, Marco Reggiannini, Davide Moroni +1ClassificationCross-Dataset Generalization

    Institute of Science and Technology, National Research Council, Pisa, Italy

  14. Open-Set Vessel Re-Identification from Underwater Ship-Radiated Noise with a Raw-Waveform Selective-Kernel Acoustic Neural Network (SKANN) and a Cross-Passage Evaluation Protocol

    Sep 7, 2026Sunil TyagiOpen-Set RecognitionConvolutional Neural Networks

    Oravont Systems LLP, Noida, India

  15. EarthLD: Towards Unified Open-World Landslide Understanding via Vision-Language Guided Diffusion Models

    Sep 1, 2026Yuanchao Su, Lianru Gao, Mengying Jiang +3Open-Set RecognitionLandslide Susceptibility Mapping

    Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau, Macao 999078, China · Key Laboratory of Computational Optical Imaging Technology, Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China · College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China

  16. OpenVeinNet: Robust Open-Set Finger Vein Verification with Dynamic Snake Convolution and Graph Learning

    Aug 26, 2026Sushrut Patwardhan, Raghavendra RamachandraBiometric IdentificationOpen-Set Recognition

    SAFE Centre, Department of Information Security and Communication Technology (IIK), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Gjøvik, Norway.

  17. Open-Set Cattle Muzzle Identification: A Leakage-Controlled Benchmark and Evaluation Protocol

    Aug 22, 2026Lalit BC, Dharmendra Singh Chaudhary, Shovit NepalBiometric IdentificationAnimal Re-Identification

    Fort Valley State University, School of Environmental, Civil, Agricultural and Mechanical Engineering, Fort Valley, GA, USA · Map Mentors, Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Lalitpur, Nepal · Tribhuvan University, Nepal +1

  18. ChiroEcho: extending automated bat vocalisation classification beyond the learned taxonomy

    Aug 18, 2026Burooj Ghani, Welmoed Eversteijn, Milan van Hirtum +4ClassificationBioacoustics

    Naturalis Biodiversity Center · Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University · People and Nature Lab, University College London +1

  19. Class Geometry as Supervision for Sample-Efficient Open-World Detection

    Aug 13, 2026Akash Rao, Zhou Chen, Revanth Reddy Palem +3Open-Vocabulary Object DetectionPrototype-Based Classification

    CSSE Department, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, 36849 · Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, 74078

  20. One-Time Training for All Grains: Open-Set Grain Recognition and Quantitative Analysis

    Aug 10, 2026Qihe Su, Mengyu Sun, Yuxi Ke +4Plant PhenotypingObject Counting

    National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, National Center of Plant Gene Research, Hubei Hongshan Laboratory, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, China · College of Engineering, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, China · Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology for Agriculture, Ministry of Education +1

  21. Calibrated Similarity and Graph Clustering for Open-Set Animal Re-Identification

    Aug 3, 2026Mohamed ElBassat, Seifeldin Elkerdany, Mohamed ElBialy +5Animal Re-IdentificationImage Matching

    Made In Alexandria Artificial Intelligence Team, Alexandria, Egypt · Faculty of Computers and Data Science, Alexandria University, Alexandria, Egypt · Faculty of Computer Science and Engineering, Alamein International University, New Alamein City, 51718, Egypt +3

  22. Few-Shot Open-Set Audio Classification via Transductive Prototype Refinement and Class Logit Enhancement

    Jul 29, 2026Tianyan Deng, Yanxiong Li, Rui Gao +1Few-Shot Audio ClassificationPrototype-Based Classification

    School of Mathematics South China University of Technology Guangzhou, China · School of Electronic and Information Engineering South China University of Technology Guangzhou, China

  23. A Geometry-Limited Identification Floor and Its Consequences for Voice-Clone Attribution in Professional Voice Actors

    Jul 17, 2026Shuhei KatoAudio Deepfake DetectionSpeaker Verification

    The author is an independent researcher in Tokyo, Japan.

  24. Face-trace: Open-Set Attribution and Progressive Discovery of Synthetic Face Generators

    Jul 8, 2026Alessia Infantino, Claudio Schiavella, Irene AmeriniOpen-Set Recognition

    Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering (DIAG), Sapienza University of Rome, 00185 Rome, Italy

  25. Open-Set Source Tracing as Compositional Factors via Structured Prototypes

    Jul 3, 2026Santiago Rubio, Antonio Almudévar, Antonio Miguel +2Audio Deepfake DetectionPrototype Learning

    ViVoLab, I3A University of Zaragoza Zaragoza, Spain

  26. Few-Shot Open-Set Audio Classification Using Attention Information-Fused Prototypes

    Jul 1, 2026Yanxiong Li, Jiaxin Tan, Qianqian Li +3Few-Shot Audio ClassificationPrototype-Based Classification

    School of Electronic and Information Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China · Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, FI-33720 Tampere, Finland

  27. Cross-Receiver Open-Set Radio Frequency Fingerprinting via Structure-First Adaptation

    Jun 30, 2026Fengchong Yao, Jianbing Li, Qing Liu +4Unsupervised Domain AdaptationDomain Adaptation

    School of Information Systems Engineering, Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou, 450001, China

  28. Geometric Gradient Rectification for Safe Open-Set Semi-Supervised Learning

    Jun 25, 2026Jiahe Chen, Qian Shao, Qiyuan Chen +4Gradient InterferenceOpen-Set Recognition

    College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) +3

  29. Exploring Dualistic Meta-Learning to Enhance Domain Generalization in Open Set Scenarios

    Jun 22, 2026Xiran Wang, Jian Zhang, Lei Qi +2Meta-LearningDomain Generalization

    State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China

  30. Subject-Level Unknown-Identity Identification from Leap Motion Controller 2 Hand Landmarks

    Jun 22, 2026Bahar Moharrer, Susanna Cifani, Marco Raoul Marini +2Biometric IdentificationOpen-Set Recognition

    Department of Computer Science Sapienza University of Rome Rome, Italy