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non-exemplar class-incremental learning

Non-exemplar class-incremental learning is a machine learning paradigm in which a model continuously learns to recognize new categories of data over time while retaining the ability to classify previously learned categories, without storing or replaying any past training samples. In this setting, a system must adapt to sequential tasks and expand its classification capabilities under strict privacy, storage, or computational constraints that prohibit saving historical exemplars. Because old data cannot be revisited during subsequent training stages, this approach focuses on preventing catastrophic forgetting and maintaining accurate decision boundaries between old and new classes by relying solely on current data, model parameter preservation, feature space regularization, or knowledge distillation.

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Self-Sustaining Representation Expansion for Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning

Self-Sustaining Representation Expansion for Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning

Kai Zhu, Wei Zhai, Yang Cao, Jiebo Luo, Zhengjun Zha

OrganizationsInstitute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science CenterUniversity of RochesterUniversity of Science and Technology of China

Why you should read this

Develops a self-sustaining representation expansion framework for non-exemplar class-incremental learning that prevents catastrophic forgetting and parameter explosion by dynamically reorganizing network structures and selectively distilling knowledge using new class prototypes.

Non-exemplar class-incremental learning is to recognize both the old and new classes when old class samples cannot be saved. It is a challenging task since representation optimization and feature retention can only be achieved under supervision from new classes. To address this problem, we propose a novel self-sustaining representation expansion scheme. Our scheme consists of a structure reorganization strategy that fuses main-branch expansion and side-branch updating to maintain the old features, and a main-branch distillation scheme to transfer the invariant knowledge. Furthermore, a prototype selection mechanism is proposed to enhance the discrimination between the old and new classes by selectively incorporating new samples into the distillation process. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate significant incremental performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 3%, 3% and 6%, respectively.

Added

2026-09-26