2022/10/10 by Yixiong Zou, Shanghang Zhang, Zou, Yixiong +5 · 4 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Cancer-related molecular mechanisms research #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning and ELM
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.04524
openalex publication_date 2022/10/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) is designed to incrementally recognize novel classes with only few training samples after the (pre-)training on base classes with sufficient samples, which focuses on both base-class performance and novel-class generalization. A well known modification to the base-class training is to apply a margin to the base-class classification. However, a dilemma exists that we can hardly achieve both good base-class performance and novel-class generalization simultaneously by applying the margin during the base-class training, which is still under explored. In this paper, we study the cause of such dilemma for FSCIL. We first interpret this dilemma as a class-level overfitting (CO) problem from the aspect of pattern learning, and then find its cause lies in the easily-satisfied constraint of learning margin-based patterns. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel margin-based FSCIL method to mitigate the CO problem by providing the pattern learning process with extra constraint from the margin-based patterns themselves. Extensive experiments on CIFAR100, Caltech-USCD Birds-200-2011 (CUB200), and miniImageNet demonstrate that the proposed method effectively mitigates the CO problem and achieves state-of-the-art performance.