# Incremental Meta-Learning via Episodic Replay Distillation for Few-Shot Image Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.04993 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04993/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Matching Networks for One Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04080/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08690/) (2017)
- [Learning to Compare: Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06025/) (2017)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [Large Scale Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13260/) (2019)
- [Progress & Compress: A scalable framework for continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06370/) (2018)
- [Generalizing from a Few Examples: A Survey on Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05046/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning with Differentiable Convex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03758/) (2019)
- [Meta-Learning for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00676/) (2018)
- [TADAM: Task dependent adaptive metric for improved few-shot learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10123/) (2018)
- [Dynamic Few-Shot Visual Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09458/) (2018)
- [How to train your MAML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09502/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10956/) (2020)
- [REMIND Your Neural Network to Prevent Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.02509/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Incremental Learning with Continually Evolved Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03047/) (2021)
- [Free Lunch for Few-shot Learning: Distribution Calibration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06395/) (2021)
- [Improved Few-Shot Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03432/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Feature Hallucination Networks for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13193/) (2020)
- [Generative Feature Replay For Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09199/) (2020)
- [A Comprehensive Study of Class Incremental Learning Algorithms for Visual Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01844/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Lifecycle-Aware Federated Continual Learning in Mobile Autonomous Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.20745/) (2026)
- [Positive Pair Distillation Considered Harmful: Continual Meta Metric Learning for Lifelong Object Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01600/) (2022)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Challenges and Opportunities of Few-Shot Learning Across Multiple Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04017/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most meta-learning approaches assume the existence of a very large set of labeled data available for episodic meta-learning of base knowledge. This contrasts with the more realistic continual learning paradigm in which data arrives incrementally in the form of tasks containing disjoint classes. In this paper we consider this problem of Incremental Meta-Learning (IML) in which classes are presented incrementally in discrete tasks. We propose an approach to IML, which we call Episodic Replay Distillation (ERD), that mixes classes from the current task with class exemplars from previous tasks when sampling episodes for meta-learning. These episodes are then used for knowledge distillation to minimize catastrophic forgetting. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that ERD surpasses the state-of-the-art. In particular, on the more challenging one-shot, long task sequence incremental meta-learning scenarios, we reduce the gap between IML and the joint-training upper bound from 3.5% / 10.1% / 13.4% with the current state-of-the-art to 2.6% / 2.9% / 5.0% with our method on Tiered-ImageNet / Mini-ImageNet / CIFAR100, respectively.