Analogical Learning-Based Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

FSCIL (Few-shot class-incremental learning) is a prominent research topic in the ML community. It faces two significant challenges: forgetting old class knowledge and overfitting to limited new class training examples. In this paper, we present a novel FSCIL approach inspired by the human brain’s analogical learning mechanism, which enables human beings to form knowledge about a target domain from the knowledge of the source domains that are analogical to the target in some aspects. The proposed analogical learning-based FSCIL (ALFSCIL) method consists of two major components: new class classifier constructor (NCCC) and Meta-Analogical training (MAT). The NCCC module utilizes a multi-head cross-attention transformer to compute analogies between new and old classes, generating new class classifiers by blending old class classifiers based on the computed analogies. The MAT module updates the parameters of the CNN feature extractor, the NCCC module, and the knowledge for each encountered class after each round of the FSCIL session. We turn the optimization process into a bi-level optimization problem(BOP) whose theoretical analysis proves the stability and plasticity of our proposed model. Experimental evaluations reveal that this proposed ALFSCIL method achieves the SOTA performance accuracies on three benchmark datasets: CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200.