Jul 2026· IEEE Transactions on Image Processing· Vol 35, pp. 8291-8305· 0 citations· 75 references
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TL;DR
Miles decouples the learnable modules with the pre-trained model, exploiting prior information from intermediate features of the backbone network to enable more flexible parameter expansion, and orchestrating an efficient expansion of the parameter space through guided optimization.
Abstract
Class Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn new concepts consistently from a data stream without forgetting. Unlike typical CIL methods which need to learn a model from scratch, pre-trained model (PTM) can easily adapt to a new task with fine-tuning. However, existing PTM-based CIL methods fail to achieve a trade-off between performance and computational expenditure, i.e., they either adopt the same parameter space so that leading catastrophic forgetting, or expand a new branch for each task but adding more computational cost. To this end, we propose MetrIc Learning with Expandable Subspace (Miles) to harness the prior information within pre-trained knowledge, thereby orchestrating an efficient expansion of the parameter space through guided optimization. Specifically, it decouples the learnable modules with the pre-trained model, exploiting prior information from intermediate features of the backbone network to enable more flexible parameter expansion. Then, a central loss is adopted to guide the new category to cluster towards the corresponding prototype in the new task subspace while incorporating an auxiliary distance regularization term to maintain metric equilibrium across tasks. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that Miles achieves state-of-the-art performance in various CIL settings.
RSIAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both performance and parameter efficiency, achieving superior stability–plasticity trade-offs with minimal trainable parameters.
Jiarui Zhao, Libo Huang, Xiangqi Li et al.· 0 citations
Deep neural networks excel in various tasks but struggle to generalize across evolving data distributions, leading to significant performance degradation under domain shifts. Domain incremental learning (DIL) addresses this challenge by enabling models to continuously adapt while retaining prior knowledge. Among existing DIL approaches, the parameter-isolation paradigm achieves state-of-the-art performance. However, these methods often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to adapt to new domains, resulting in either insufficient learning capacity or redundant parameters. In this work, we propose BPG, a unified framework that addresses both challenges through two complementary components: BPG-Adapter, which dynamically determines each domain's adapter hidden dimension based on domain-specific feature separability, and BPG-Inference, a soft domain mixture strategy that integrates multiple domain-specific models at test time, mitigating domain ID misselection. Experimental results on DomainNet, CDDB, and CORe50 demonstrate that BPG consistently outperforms uniform adapter-based approaches and hard domain selection strategies, achieving state-of-the-art average accuracy while reducing forgetting to as low as 0.22% on DomainNet.
Qiang Wang, Songlin Dong, Shaokun Wang et al.· 0 citations
Exemplar-free class-incremental learning (EFCIL) poses the challenge that models cannot access data from previous tasks when learning new classes, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Recent methods freeze the feature extractor after the initial task and adapt only the classification mechanism to new classes, achieving strong performance. However, they largely overlook improving the frozen feature extractor's adaptability to unseen classes, which limits further performance gains. To address this limitation, we propose a novel complementary asymmetric representation learning (CARL) framework to enhance the model's adaptability to unseen classes. The core of CARL is the asymmetric representation learning (ARL) architecture, which combines a base encoder that extracts discriminative features for the initial task with a projection multilayer perceptron (MLP) head appended to its output. By introducing the projection head, the original output representation of the base encoder becomes an intermediate representation in the projected branch, encouraging the encoder to learn more generalizable features. This allows the model to preserve discriminative representations for the initially learned classes while improving its adaptability to unseen classes. In addition, the CARL framework employs two parallel ARL branches and aggregates their Mahalanobis distances during inference to improve prediction performance. To evaluate the efficacy of CARL, we compare it with recent methods using three widely recognized datasets. The proposed approach improves average accuracy over the best competing method by 3.70 percentage points on CIFAR-100, 2.63 percentage points on Tiny-ImageNet, and 2.90 percentage points on ImageNet-Subset.
Experimental findings show that pretrained models outperform those trained from scratch in terms of accuracy, convergence speed, and robustness, and a unified framework is proposed to integrate both processes in a deep learning pipeline.
Kwame Nkosi· International Journal of App...· 0 citations
TASSO, a new paradigm that efficiently preserves the latent space geometry while ensuring network plasticity, is introduced with two complementary techniques: subspace learning and geometry-aware knowledge distillation.
Changming Sun, Francesco Barbato, Matteo Caligiuri et al.· 0 citations