TGCD: A Framework for Generalized Category Discovery in Time-Series Data

Abstract

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify labeled instances from known categories while discovering novel categories from unlabeled data. Despite recent progress in GCD for computer vision, existing GCD approaches largely rely on static final-step representations (in the visual domain), overlooking the temporally evolving nature of time-series data. In this paper, we introduce TGCD, the first framework specifically designed for GCD in time-series data. TGCD leverages both the dynamics of latent representations and the heterogeneity of predictions across multiple temporal segments to disover unknown (i.e., novel) categories, based on a pre-trained time-series foundation model. We propose a unified learning objective for TGCD that integrates the following three components: (i) a Stochastic Temporal Segment Dropout (STeSD) objective that regularizes the model by selectively penalizing high-entropy segments to encourage confident predictions on uncertain regions of the time-series, and (ii) a Known–Unknown Temporal Discriminability (KUTD) objective that promotes representational separation between known and unknown categories within unlabeled data and (iii) a margin-aware classification objective to improve generalization. Empirical evaluation on six multivariate time-series data sets demonstrates that the TGCD substantially outperforms existing GCD methods, particularly in discovering unknown categories. We further conduct ablation studies to highlight the individual contributions of each component. Additionally, we provide the first comprehensive benchmarking of recent GCD approaches on time-series data, revealing the limitations of naive transfer and underscoring the benefits of temporal modeling.