# ClaRe: Practical Class Incremental Learning By Remembering Previous Class Representations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15486 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15486/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Mar 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08690/) (2017)
- [End-to-End Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09536/) (2018)
- [Maintaining Discrimination and Fairness in Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07053/) (2019)
- [Memory Replay GANs: learning to generate images from new categories without forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02058/) (2018)
- [Continual Learning in Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08395/) (2017)
- [ScaIL: Classifier Weights Scaling for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.05755/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a practical and simple yet efficient method to effectively deal with the catastrophic forgetting for Class Incremental Learning (CIL) tasks. CIL tends to learn new concepts perfectly, but not at the expense of performance and accuracy for old data. Learning new knowledge in the absence of data instances from previous classes or even imbalance samples of both old and new classes makes CIL an ongoing challenging problem. These issues can be tackled by storing exemplars belonging to the previous tasks or by utilizing the rehearsal strategy. Inspired by the rehearsal strategy with the approach of using generative models, we propose ClaRe, an efficient solution for CIL by remembering the representations of learned classes in each increment. Taking this approach leads to generating instances with the same distribution of the learned classes. Hence, our model is somehow retrained from the scratch using a new training set including both new and the generated samples. Subsequently, the imbalance data problem is also solved. ClaRe has a better generalization than prior methods thanks to producing diverse instances from the distribution of previously learned classes. We comprehensively evaluate ClaRe on the MNIST benchmark. Results show a very low degradation on accuracy against facing new knowledge over time. Furthermore, contrary to the most proposed solutions, the memory limitation is not problematic any longer which is considered as a consequential issue in this research area.