Rethinking Few-shot Class-incremental Learning: Learning from Yourself

作     者：Tang, Yu-Ming Peng, Yi-Xing Meng, Jingke Zheng, Wei-Shi 

作者机构：School of Computer Science and Engineering Sun Yat-sen University China Peng Cheng Laboratory Shenzhen China Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing Ministry of Education China Guangdong Province Key Laboratory of Information Security Technology Sun Yat-sen University China 

出 版 物：《arXiv》 (arXiv)

年 卷 期：2024年

核心收录：

主　　题：Complex networks 

摘      要：Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to learn sequential classes with limited samples in a few-shot fashion. Inherited from the classical class-incremental learning setting, the popular benchmark of FSCIL uses averaged accuracy (aAcc) and last-task averaged accuracy (lAcc) as the evaluation metrics. However, we reveal that such evaluation metrics may not provide adequate emphasis on the novel class performance, and the continual learning ability of FSCIL methods could be ignored under this benchmark. In this work, as a complement to existing metrics, we offer a new metric called generalized average accuracy (gAcc) which is designed to provide an extra equitable evaluation by incorporating different perspectives of the performance under the guidance of a parameter α. We also present an overall metric in the form of the area under the curve (AUC) along the α. Under the guidance of gAcc, we release the potential of intermediate features of the vision transformers to boost the novel-class performance. Taking information from intermediate layers which are less class-specific and more generalizable, we manage to rectify the final features, leading to a more generalizable transformer-based FSCIL framework. Without complex network designs or cumbersome training procedures, our method outperforms existing FSCIL methods at aAcc and gAcc on three datasets. See codes at 1 Copyright © 2024, The Authors. All rights reserved.