Understanding accuracy decay in online image retrieval systems within the context of open-set classification and unsupervised clustering

Image retrieval systems are extremely useful to political scientists and human rights advocates attempting to understand the scope and spread of disinformation in massive datasets. However, in standard image retrieval tasks the corpus of images is unchanging as time moves forward. When considering online disinformation this is clearly not the case. Image retrieval in an online system can essentially be modeled as an open-set problem, where there is no guarantee that the classes of images seen before will have any correspondence to the classes of images seen at present or in the future.