# Semantic Drift Compensation for Class-Incremental Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00440 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00440/

## Key facts

- Cited by 241 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 241)

- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [DER: Dynamically Expandable Representation for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16788/) (2021)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [Online Continual Learning in Image Classification: An Empirical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10423/) (2021)
- [Class-Incremental Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03648/) (2023)
- [Few-Shot Incremental Learning with Continually Evolved Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03047/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Class-Incremental Learning with Pre-Trained Models: Generalizability and Adaptivity are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07338/) (2023)
- [A Model or 603 Exemplars: Towards Memory-Efficient Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13218/) (2022)
- [Supervised Contrastive Replay: Revisiting the Nearest Class Mean Classifier in Online Class-Incremental Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13885/) (2021)
- [Class-Incremental Continual Learning into the eXtended DER-verse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00766/) (2022)
- [FeTrIL: Feature Translation for Exemplar-Free Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13131/) (2022)
- [Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Incremental Few-Shot Learning by Finding Flat Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01549/) (2021)
- [Self-Sustaining Representation Expansion for Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06359/) (2022)
- [Expandable Subspace Ensemble for Pre-Trained Model-Based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12030/) (2024)
- [Self-Promoted Prototype Refinement for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08918/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning by Sampling Multi-Phase Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17030/) (2022)
- [FeCAM: Exploiting the Heterogeneity of Class Distributions in Exemplar-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14062/) (2023)
- [On Learning the Geodesic Path for Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08572/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning from an Open-Set Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00147/) (2022)
- [Learning without Forgetting for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19270/) (2023)
- [Continual Learning and Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05175/) (2024)
- [Representation Compensation Networks for Continual Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05402/) (2022)
- [RMM: Reinforced Memory Management for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.05792/) (2023)
- [R-DFCIL: Relation-Guided Representation Learning for Data-Free Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13104/) (2022)
- [Essentials for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09517/) (2021)
- [ACIL: Analytic Class-Incremental Learning with Absolute Memorization and Privacy Protection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14922/) (2022)
- [Recent Advances of Continual Learning in Computer Vision: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11369/) (2021)
- [A Closer Look at Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17269/) (2022)
- [Efficient Feature Transformations for Discriminative and Generative Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13558/) (2021)
- [First Session Adaptation: A Strong Replay-Free Baseline for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13199/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Class-incremental learning of deep networks sequentially increases the number of classes to be classified. During training, the network has only access to data of one task at a time, where each task contains several classes. In this setting, networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting which refers to the drastic drop in performance on previous tasks. The vast majority of methods have studied this scenario for classification networks, where for each new task the classification layer of the network must be augmented with additional weights to make room for the newly added classes. Embedding networks have the advantage that new classes can be naturally included into the network without adding new weights. Therefore, we study incremental learning for embedding networks. In addition, we propose a new method to estimate the drift, called semantic drift, of features and compensate for it without the need of any exemplars. We approximate the drift of previous tasks based on the drift that is experienced by current task data. We perform experiments on fine-grained datasets, CIFAR100 and ImageNet-Subset. We demonstrate that embedding networks suffer significantly less from catastrophic forgetting. We outperform existing methods which do not require exemplars and obtain competitive results compared to methods which store exemplars. Furthermore, we show that our proposed SDC when combined with existing methods to prevent forgetting consistently improves results.