Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) is challenging due to extremely limited training data; while aiming to reduce catastrophic forgetting and learn new information. We propose Diffusion-FSCIL, a novel approach that employs a text-to-image diffusion model as a frozen backbone. Our conjecture is that FSCIL can be tackled using a large generative model's capabilities benefiting from 1) generation ability via large-scale pre-training; 2) multi-scale representation; 3) representational flexibility through the text encoder. To maximize the representation capability, we propose to extract multiple complementary diffusion features to play roles as latent replay with slight support from feature distillation for preventing generative biases. Our framework realizes efficiency through 1) using a frozen backbone; 2) minimal trainable components; 3) batch processing of multiple feature extractions. Extensive experiments on CUB-200, miniImageNet, and CIFAR-100 show that Diffusion-FSCIL surpasses state-of-the-art methods, preserving performance on previously learned classes and adapting effectively to new ones.
We study model confidence calibration in class-incremental learning, where models learn from sequential tasks with different class sets. While existing works primarily focus on accuracy, maintaining calibrated confidence has been largely overlooked. Unfortunately, most post-hoc calibration techniques are not designed to work with the limited memories of old-task data typical in class-incremental learning, as retaining a sufficient validation set would be impractical. Thus, we propose T-CIL, a novel temperature scaling approach for class-incremental learning without a validation set for old tasks, that leverages adversarially perturbed exemplars from memory. Directly using exemplars is inadequate for temperature optimization, since they are already used for training. The key idea of T-CIL is to perturb exemplars more strongly for old tasks than for the new task by adjusting the perturbation direction based on feature distance, with the single magnitude determined using the new-task validation set. This strategy makes the perturbation magnitude computed from the new task also applicable to old tasks, leveraging the tendency that the accuracy of old tasks is lower than that of the new task. We empirically show that T-CIL significantly outperforms various baselines in terms of calibration on real datasets and can be integrated with existing class-incremental learning techniques with minimal impact on accuracy.
Class-incremental Learning (CIL) enables the model to incrementally absorb knowledge from new classes and build a generic classifier across all previously encountered classes. When the model optimizes with new classes, the knowledge of previous classes is inevitably erased, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Addressing this challenge requires making a trade-off between retaining old knowledge and accommodating new information. However, this balancing process often requires sacrificing some information, which can lead to a partial loss in the model's ability to discriminate between classes. To tackle this issue, we design the adaptive weighted parameter fusion with Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), which not only takes into account the variability of the data distribution of different tasks, but also retains all the effective information of the parameter matrix to the greatest extent. In addition, we introduce a balance factor that can balance the data distribution alignment and distinguishability of adjacent tasks. Experimental results on several traditional benchmarks validate the superiority of the proposed method.
Few-shot class-incremental Learning (FSCIL) enables models to learn new classes from limited data while retaining performance on previously learned classes. Traditional FSCIL methods often require fine-tuning parameters with limited new class data and suffer from a separation between learning new classes and utilizing old knowledge. Inspired by the analogical learning mechanisms of the human brain, we propose a novel analogical generative method. Our approach includes the Brain-Inspired Analogical Generator (BiAG), which derives new class weights from existing classes without parameter fine-tuning during incremental stages. BiAG consists of three components: Weight Self-Attention Module (WSA), Weight & Prototype Analogical Attention Module (WPAA), and Semantic Conversion Module (SCM). SCM uses Neural Collapse theory for semantic conversion, WSA supplements new class weights, and WPAA computes analogies to generate new class weights. Experiments on miniImageNet, CUB-200, and CIFAR-100 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves higher final and average accuracy compared to SOTA methods.
Recent pre-trained vision-language models (PT-VLMs) often face a Multi-Domain Class-Incremental Learning (MCIL) scenario in practice, where several classes and domains of multi-modal tasks are incrementally arrived. Without access to previously learned tasks and unseen tasks, memory-constrained MCIL suffers from forward and backward forgetting. To alleviate the above challenges, parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques (PEFT), such as prompt tuning, are employed to adapt the PT-VLM to the diverse incrementally learned tasks. To achieve effective new task adaptation, existing methods only consider the effect of PEFT strategy selection, but neglect the influence of PEFT parameter setting (e.g., prompting). In this paper, we tackle the challenge of optimizing prompt designs for diverse tasks in MCIL and propose an Instance-Aware Prompting (IAP) framework. Specifically, our Instance-Aware Gated Prompting (IA-GP) module enhances adaptation to new tasks while mitigating forgetting by dynamically assigning prompts across transformer layers at the instance level. Our Instance-Aware Class-Distribution-Driven Prompting (IA-CDDP) improves the task adaptation process by determining an accurate task-label-related confidence score for each instance. Experimental evaluations across 11 datasets, using three performance metrics, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code can be found at https://github.com/FerdinandZJU/IAP.
Continual learning (CL) refers to the ability to continuously learn and accumulate new knowledge while retaining useful information from past experiences. Although numerous CL methods have been proposed in recent years, it is not straightforward to deploy them directly to real-world decision-making problems due to their computational cost and lack of uncertainty quantification. To address these issues, we propose CL-BRUNO, a probabilistic, Neural Process-based CL model that performs scalable and tractable Bayesian update and prediction. Our proposed approach uses deep-generative models to create a unified probabilistic framework capable of handling different types of CL problems such as task- and class-incremental learning, allowing users to integrate information across different CL scenarios using a single model. Our approach is able to prevent catastrophic forgetting through distributional and functional regularisation without the need of retaining any previously seen samples, making it appealing to applications where data privacy or storage capacity is of concern. Experiments show that CL-BRUNO outperforms existing methods on both natural image and biomedical data sets, confirming its effectiveness in real-world applications.
Class incremental learning (CIL) aims to enable models to continuously learn new classes without catastrophically forgetting old ones. A promising direction is to learn and use prototypes of classes during incremental updates. Despite simplicity and intuition, we find that such methods suffer from inadequate representation capability and unsatisfied feature overlap. These two factors cause class-wise confusion and limited performance. In this paper, we develop a Confusion-REduced AuTo-Encoder classifier (CREATE) for CIL. Specifically, our method employs a lightweight auto-encoder module to learn compact manifold for each class in the latent subspace, constraining samples to be well reconstructed only on the semantically correct auto-encoder. Thus, the representation stability and capability of class distributions are enhanced, alleviating the potential class-wise confusion problem. To further distinguish the overlapped features, we propose a confusion-aware latent space separation loss that ensures samples are closely distributed in their corresponding low-dimensional manifold while keeping away from the distributions of features from other classes. Our method demonstrates stronger representational capacity and discrimination ability by learning disentangled manifolds and reduces class confusion. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and settings show that CREATE outperforms other state-of-the-art methods up to 5.41%.
Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) enables models to continuously learn new class knowledge while retaining previous classes, facilitating adaptation and evolution in dynamic, real-world environments. Traditional CIL methods primarily rely on visual features, which limits their effectiveness in complex, multimodal scenarios. In contrast, VLMs show promising potential for enhancing CIL by leveraging pre-trained knowledge and integrating multi-modal semantic cues such as text and vision. However, existing approaches struggle to mitigate catastrophic forgetting while preserving the generalization strengths of VLMs across diverse modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a Feature Calibration Enhanced Parameter Synthesis (FCPS) framework. Specifically, FCPS introduces a dynamic parameter adjustment mechanism that iteratively calibrates the contribution of original visual features to the final class decision, thus preserving the model's intrinsic generalization capability across modalities. Simultaneously, parameter integration enables effective knowledge transfer, maintaining a balance between acquiring new class representations and preserving old knowledge. Experimental results on popular benchmarks (e.g., CIFAR100 and ImageNet100) validate the superiority of the proposed method.
Continual learning in computer vision faces the critical challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where models struggle to retain prior knowledge while adapting to new tasks. Although recent studies have attempted to leverage the generalization capabilities of pre-trained models to mitigate overfitting on current tasks, models still tend to forget details of previously learned categories as tasks progress, leading to misclassification. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Knowledge Graph Enhanced Generative Multi-modal model (KG-GMM) that builds an evolving knowledge graph throughout the learning process. Our approach utilizes relationships within the knowledge graph to augment the class labels and assigns different relations to similar categories to enhance model differentiation. During testing, we propose a Knowledge Graph Augmented Inference method that locates specific categories by analyzing relationships within the generated text, thereby reducing the loss of detailed information about old classes when learning new knowledge and alleviating forgetting. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively leverages relational information to help the model correct mispredictions, achieving state-of-the-art results in both conventional CIL and few-shot CIL settings, confirming the efficacy of knowledge graphs at preserving knowledge in the continual learning scenarios.
According to the forgetting curve theory, we can enhance memory retention by learning extensive data and taking adequate rest. This means that in order to effectively retain new knowledge, it is essential to learn it thoroughly and ensure sufficient rest so that our brain can memorize without forgetting. The main takeaway from this theory is that learning extensive data at once necessitates sufficient rest before learning the same data again. This aspect of human long-term memory retention can be effectively utilized to address the continual learning of neural networks. Retaining new knowledge for a long period of time without catastrophic forgetting is the critical problem of continual learning. Therefore, based on Ebbinghaus' theory, we introduce the view-batch model that adjusts the learning schedules to optimize the recall interval between retraining the same samples. The proposed view-batch model allows the network to get enough rest to learn extensive knowledge from the same samples with a recall interval of sufficient length. To this end, we specifically present two approaches: 1) a replay method that guarantees the optimal recall interval, and 2) a self-supervised learning that acquires extensive knowledge from a single training sample at a time. We empirically show that these approaches of our method are aligned with the forgetting curve theory, which can enhance long-term memory. In our experiments, we also demonstrate that our method significantly improves many state-of-the-art continual learning methods in various protocols and scenarios. We open-source this project at https://github.com/hankyul2/ViewBatchModel.
Domain-Incremental Learning (DIL) enables vision models to adapt to changing conditions in real-world environments while maintaining the knowledge acquired from previous domains. Given privacy concerns and training time, Rehearsal-Free DIL (RFDIL) is more practical. Inspired by the incremental cognitive process of the human brain, we design Dual-level Concept Prototypes (DualCP) for each class to address the conflict between learning new knowledge and retaining old knowledge in RFDIL. To construct DualCP, we propose a Concept Prototype Generator (CPG) that generates both coarse-grained and fine-grained prototypes for each class. Additionally, we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine calibrator (C2F) to align image features with DualCP. Finally, we propose a Dual Dot-Regression (DDR) loss function to optimize our C2F module. Extensive experiments on the DomainNet, CDDB, and CORe50 datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
The significant inter-subject variability in electroen-cephalogram (EEG) signals often results in substantial changes to neural network weights as data distributions shift. This variability frequently causes catastrophic forgetting in continual EEG decoding tasks, where previously acquired knowledge is overwritten as new subjects are introduced. While retraining the entire dataset for each new subject can mitigate forgetting, this approach imposes significant computational costs, rendering it impractical for real-world applications. Therefore, an ideal brain-computer interface (BCI) model should incrementally learn new information without requiring complete retraining, thereby reducing computational overhead. Existing EEG decoding meth-ods typically rely on large, centralized source-domain datasets for pre-training to improve model generalization. However, in practical scenarios, data availability is often constrained by privacy concerns. Furthermore, these methods are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting in continual EEG decoding tasks, significantly limiting their utility in long-term learning scenarios. To address these issues, we propose the Personalized Continual EEG Decoding (PCED) framework for continual EEG decoding. The framework uses Euclidean Alignment for fast domain adap-tation, reducing inter-subject variability. To retain knowledge and prevent forgetting, it includes an exemplar replay mechanism that preserves key information from past tasks. A reservoir sampling-based memory management strategy optimizes exemplar storage to handle memory constraints in long-term learning. Experiments on the OpenBMI dataset with 54 subjects show that PCED balances knowledge retention and classification performance, providing an efficient solution for real-world BCI applications.
This paper outlines our approach to the 5th CLVision challenge at CVPR, which addresses the Class-Incremental with Repetition (CIR) scenario. In contrast to traditional class incremental learning, this novel setting introduces unique challenges and research opportunities, particularly through the integration of unlabeled data into the training process. In the CIR scenario, encountered classes may reappear in later learning experiences, and each experience may involve only a subset of the overall class distribution. Additionally, the unlabeled data provided during training may include instances of unseen classes, or irrelevant classes which should be ignored. Our approach focuses on retaining previously learned knowledge by utilizing knowledge distillation and pseudo-labeling techniques. The key characteristic of our method is the exploitation of unlabeled data during training, in order to maintain optimal performance on instances of previously encountered categories and reduce the detrimental effects of catastrophic forgetting. Our method achieves an average accuracy of 16.68\% during the pre-selection phase and 21.19% during the final evaluation phase, outperforming the baseline accuracy of 9.39%. We provide the implementation code at https://github.com/panagiotamoraiti/continual-learning-challenge-2024 .
The aim of this work is to develop an approach that enables Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to efficiently learn to navigate in large-scale urban environments and transfer their acquired expertise to novel environments. To achieve this, we propose a meta-curriculum training scheme. First, meta-training allows the agent to learn a master policy to generalize across tasks. The resulting model is then fine-tuned on the downstream tasks. We organize the training curriculum in a hierarchical manner such that the agent is guided from coarse to fine towards the target task. In addition, we introduce Incremental Self-Adaptive Reinforcement learning (ISAR), an algorithm that combines the ideas of incremental learning and meta-reinforcement learning (MRL). In contrast to traditional reinforcement learning (RL), which focuses on acquiring a policy for a specific task, MRL aims to learn a policy with fast transfer ability to novel tasks. However, the MRL training process is time consuming, whereas our proposed ISAR algorithm achieves faster convergence than the conventional MRL algorithm. We evaluate the proposed methodologies in simulated environments and demonstrate that using this training philosophy in conjunction with the ISAR algorithm significantly improves the convergence speed for navigation in large-scale cities and the adaptation proficiency in novel environments.
This paper presents RAG-KG-IL, a novel multi-agent hybrid framework designed to enhance the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with an Incremental Learning (IL) approach. Despite recent advancements, LLMs still face significant challenges in reasoning with structured data, handling dynamic knowledge evolution, and mitigating hallucinations, particularly in mission-critical domains. Our proposed RAG-KG-IL framework addresses these limitations by employing a multi-agent architecture that enables continuous knowledge updates, integrates structured knowledge, and incorporates autonomous agents for enhanced explainability and reasoning. The framework utilizes RAG to ensure the generated responses are grounded in verifiable information, while KGs provide structured domain knowledge for improved consistency and depth of understanding. The Incremental Learning approach allows for dynamic updates to the knowledge base without full retraining, significantly reducing computational overhead and improving the model's adaptability. We evaluate the framework using real-world case studies involving health-related queries, comparing it to state-of-the-art models like GPT-4o and a RAG-only baseline. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces hallucination rates and improves answer completeness and reasoning accuracy. The results underscore the potential of combining RAG, KGs, and multi-agent systems to create intelligent, adaptable systems capable of real-time knowledge integration and reasoning in complex domains.
This work presents the first condensation approach for procedural video datasets used in temporal action segmentation. We propose a condensation framework that leverages generative prior learned from the dataset and network inversion to condense data into compact latent codes with significant storage reduced across temporal and channel aspects. Orthogonally, we propose sampling diverse and representative action sequences to minimize video-wise redundancy. Our evaluation on standard benchmarks demonstrates consistent effectiveness in condensing TAS datasets and achieving competitive performances. Specifically, on the Breakfast dataset, our approach reduces storage by over 500$\times$ while retaining 83% of the performance compared to training with the full dataset. Furthermore, when applied to a downstream incremental learning task, it yields superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art.
3D perception plays a crucial role in real-world applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and AR/VR. In practical scenarios, 3D perception models must continuously adapt to new data and emerging object categories, but retraining from scratch incurs prohibitive costs. Therefore, adopting class-incremental learning (CIL) becomes particularly essential. However, real-world 3D point cloud data often include corrupted samples, which poses significant challenges for existing CIL methods and leads to more severe forgetting on corrupted data. To address these challenges, we consider the scenario in which a CIL model can be updated using point clouds with unknown corruption to better simulate real-world conditions. Inspired by Farthest Point Sampling, we propose a novel exemplar selection strategy that effectively preserves intra-class diversity when selecting replay exemplars, mitigating forgetting induced by data corruption. Furthermore, we introduce a point cloud downsampling-based replay method to utilize the limited replay buffer memory more efficiently, thereby further enhancing the model's continual learning ability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves the performance of replay-based CIL baselines by 2% to 11%, proving its effectiveness and promising potential for real-world 3D applications.
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) represents a cutting-edge paradigm within the broader scope of machine learning, designed to empower models with the ability to assimilate new classes of data with limited examples while safeguarding existing knowledge. The paper will present different solutions which contain extensive experiments across large-scale datasets, domain shifts, and network architectures to evaluate and compare the selected methods. We highlight their advantages and then present an experimental approach with the purpose of improving the most promising one by replacing the visual-language (V-L) model (CLIP) with another V-L model (CLOOB) that seem to outperform it on zero-shot learning tasks. The aim of this report is to present an experimental method for FSCIL that would improve its performance. We also plan to offer an overview followed by an analysis of the recent advancements in FSCIL domain, focusing on various strategies to mitigate catastrophic forgetting and improve the adaptability of models to evolving tasks and datasets.
Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning (EFCIL) aims to learn from a sequence of tasks without having access to previous task data. In this paper, we consider the challenging Cold Start scenario in which insufficient data is available in the first task to learn a high-quality backbone. This is especially challenging for EFCIL since it requires high plasticity, resulting in feature drift which is difficult to compensate for in the exemplar-free setting. To address this problem, we propose an effective approach to consolidate feature representations by regularizing drift in directions highly relevant to previous tasks and employs prototypes to reduce task-recency bias. Our approach, which we call Elastic Feature Consolidation++ (EFC++) exploits a tractable second-order approximation of feature drift based on a proposed Empirical Feature Matrix (EFM). The EFM induces a pseudo-metric in feature space which we use to regularize feature drift in important directions and to update Gaussian prototypes. In addition, we introduce a post-training prototype re-balancing phase that updates classifiers to compensate for feature drift. Experimental results on CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, ImageNet-Subset, ImageNet-1K and DomainNet demonstrate that EFC++ is better able to learn new tasks by maintaining model plasticity and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art.
In dynamic environments where new concepts continuously emerge, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) must adapt by learning new classes while retaining previously acquired ones. This challenge is addressed by Class-Incremental Learning (CIL). This paper introduces Generative Binary Memory (GBM), a novel CIL pseudo-replay approach which generates synthetic binary pseudo-exemplars. Relying on Bernoulli Mixture Models (BMMs), GBM effectively models the multi-modal characteristics of class distributions, in a latent, binary space. With a specifically-designed feature binarizer, our approach applies to any conventional DNN. GBM also natively supports Binary Neural Networks (BNNs) for highly-constrained model sizes in embedded systems. The experimental results demonstrate that GBM achieves higher than state-of-the-art average accuracy on CIFAR100 (+2.9%) and TinyImageNet (+1.5%) for a ResNet-18 equipped with our binarizer. GBM also outperforms emerging CIL methods for BNNs, with +3.1% in final accuracy and x4.7 memory reduction, on CORE50.