This paper aims to develop a method that learns independent models for each session that can inherently prevent catastrophic forgetting and demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-100 and mini-ImageNet datasets.
Abstract
Current mainstream deep learning techniques exhibit an over-reliance on extensive training data and a lack of adaptability to the dynamic world, marking a considerable disparity from human intelligence. To bridge this gap, Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning(FSCIL) has emerged, focusing on continuous learning of new categories with limited samples without forgetting old knowledge. Existing FSCIL studies typically use a single model to learn knowledge across all sessions, inevitably leading to the stability–plasticity dilemma. Unlike machines that usually consolidate all categories into a single parameter space, cortical memory organization suggests that different types of knowledge can be distributed and organized across specialized cortical regions. Inspired by this organization principle, our paper aims to develop a method that learns independent models for each session. It can inherently prevent catastrophic forgetting. During the testing stage, our method integrates Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) for model deployment. Our method provides a fresh viewpoint for FSCIL and demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-100 and mini-ImageNet datasets.
The results suggest that the combination of sparse representations, local learning, and persistent memory is a promising direction for continual learning, while motivating further investigation into the respective roles of learning rules, representations, and architectural design in mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
We introduce CMP (Cognitive Memory Primitive), an architecture that represents inputs as sparse relational codes, stores them in a two-tier competitive memory, and learns entirely through local, gradient-free updates, with no backpropagation anywhere in the network. We use this architecture to test a specific hypothesis: that catastrophic forgetting, usually treated as a training-time defect to be patched with replay or regularization, is instead a structural consequence of how backpropagation assigns credit and that a learning rule that is local and sparse by construction should resist it without a patch. On a controlled domain-incremental protocol across 15 text domains, three-seed replicated, CMP's backward transfer is 15-19x better than a matched-size Transformer trained with online EWC, and the result survives a domain-order control (reported as a range, +0.24 to +0.44, rather than a single figure). We report this alongside a real, substantial accuracy gap versus the Transformer baseline, a null result on a recognized vision benchmark, and a diagnosed, unresolved failure attempting to combine this architecture with a separate mechanism that improves raw accuracy, disclosed because an honest negative result is more useful than an omitted one. The central claim is narrow and falsifiable: local, sparse, non-backpropagation learning measurably resists catastrophic forgetting better than backpropagation with its standard fix, under conditions we state precisely.
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
Investigation of the influence of fully connected FC layer architecture on parameter regularization in the class incremental learning setting using a modified ResNet-18 trained on the CIFAR-10 dataset provides both a novel parameter regularization strategy and new insights into the interaction between network architecture and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning.
Henry Huang· Journal of high school scien...· 0 citations
This review provides a structured overview of major CL paradigms, including task-incremental, domain-incremental, class-incremental, online, multimodal, and federated CL, and examines the theoretical foundations of CL, particularly the stability–plasticity dilemma, catastrophic forgetting, transfer dynamics, and representation learning.
