We propose to bridge the gap between semi-supervised and unsupervised image recognition with a flexible method that performs well for both generalized category discovery (GCD) and image clustering. Despite the overlap in motivation between these tasks, the methods themselves are restricted to a single task -- GCD methods are reliant on the labeled portion of the data, and deep image clustering methods have no built-in way to leverage the labels efficiently. We connect the two regimes with an innovative approach that Utilizes Neighbor Information for Classification (UNIC) both in the unsupervised (clustering) and semisupervised (GCD) setting. State-of-the-art clustering methods already rely heavily on nearest neighbors. We improve on their results substantially in two parts, first with a sampling and cleaning strategy where we identify accurate positive and negative neighbors, and secondly by finetuning the backbone with clustering losses computed by sampling both types of neighbors. We then adapt this pipeline to GCD by utilizing the labelled images as ground truth neighbors. Our method yields state-of-the-art results for both clustering (+3% ImageNet-100, Imagenet200) and GCD (+0.8% ImageNet-100, +5% CUB, +2% SCars, +4% Aircraft).

COVID-19 continues to cause a significant impact on public health. To minimize this impact, policy makers undertake containment measures that however, when carried out disproportionately to the actual threat, as a result if errorneous threat assessment, cause undesirable long-term socio-economic complications. In addition, macro-level or national level decision making fails to consider the localized sensitivities in small regions. Hence, the need arises for region-wise threat assessments that provide insights on the behaviour of COVID-19 through time, enabled through accurate forecasts. In this study, a forecasting solution is proposed, to predict daily new cases of COVID-19 in regions small enough where containment measures could be locally implemented, by targeting three main shortcomings that exist in literature; the unreliability of existing data caused by inconsistent testing patterns in smaller regions, weak deploy-ability of forecasting models towards predicting cases in previously unseen regions, and model training biases caused by the imbalanced nature of data in COVID-19 epi-curves. Hence, the contributions of this study are three-fold; an optimized smoothing technique to smoothen less deterministic epi-curves based on epidemiological dynamics of that region, a Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM) based forecasting model trained using data from select regions to create a representative and diverse training set that maximizes deploy-ability in regions with lack of historical data, and an adaptive loss function whilst training to mitigate the data imbalances seen in epi-curves. The proposed smoothing technique, the generalized training strategy and the adaptive loss function largely increased the overall accuracy of the forecast, which enables efficient containment measures at a more localized micro-level.