# Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning from an Open-Set Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.00147 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00147/

## Key facts

- Cited by 84 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Decoupling Representation and Classifier for Long-Tailed Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09217/) (2019)
- [SphereFace: Deep Hypersphere Embedding for Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.08063/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Investigation of Catastrophic Forgetting in Gradient-Based Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6211/) (2013)
- [End-to-End Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09536/) (2018)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10956/) (2020)
- [Semantic Drift Compensation for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00440/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Incremental Learning with Continually Evolved Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03047/) (2021)
- [Supervised Contrastive Replay: Revisiting the Nearest Class Mean Classifier in Online Class-Incremental Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13885/) (2021)
- [Semantic-aware Knowledge Distillation for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04059/) (2021)
- [Self-Promoted Prototype Refinement for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.08918/) (2021)
- [MgSvF: Multi-Grained Slow vs. Fast Framework for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15524/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 84)

- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Neural Collapse Inspired Feature-Classifier Alignment for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03004/) (2023)
- [FeCAM: Exploiting the Heterogeneity of Class Distributions in Exemplar-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14062/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08130/) (2023)
- [First Session Adaptation: A Strong Replay-Free Baseline for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13199/) (2023)
- [On the Soft-Subnetwork for Few-shot Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07529/) (2022)
- [Pre-trained Vision and Language Transformers Are Few-Shot Incremental Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02117/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Class-incremental Learning for Classification and Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06764/) (2023)
- [Compositional Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17022/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning with Attention-Aware Self-Adaptive Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09857/) (2024)
- [Neural Collapse Terminus: A Unified Solution for Class Incremental Learning and Its Variants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01746/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Few-shot Class-incremental Learning: Learning from Yourself](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07468/) (2024)
- [Non-Exemplar Online Class-incremental Continual Learning via Dual-prototype Self-augment and Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10891/) (2023)
- [Dynamic Integration of Task-Specific Adapters for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14983/) (2024)
- [CLOSER: Towards Better Representation Learning for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05627/) (2024)
- [Continual Adapter Tuning with Semantic Shift Compensation for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19979/) (2024)
- [Calibrating Higher-Order Statistics for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning with Pre-trained Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06622/) (2024)
- [Navigating Semantic Drift in Task-Agnostic Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.07560/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Pool-based Prompt Learning for Few-shot Class-incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09183/) (2025)
- [NTK-Guided Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12486/) (2024)
- [Mamba-FSCIL: Dynamic Adaptation with Selective State Space Model for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06136/) (2024)
- [Semantic-visual Guided Transformer for Few-shot Class-incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15494/) (2023)
- [Continual Learning: Forget-free Winning Subnetworks for Video Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11973/) (2023)
- [Delve into Base-Novel Confusion: Redundancy Exploration for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04918/) (2024)
- [Adaptive Decision Boundary for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10976/) (2025)
- [EKPC: Elastic Knowledge Preservation and Compensation for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12351/) (2025)
- [Generalized Few-Shot Continual Learning with Contrastive Mixture of Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05936/) (2023)
- [Forget-free Continual Learning with Soft-Winning SubNetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14962/) (2023)
- [Few-shot Class-incremental Learning for Cross-domain Disease Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05734/) (2023)
- [Image-Object-Specific Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02833/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The continual appearance of new objects in the visual world poses considerable challenges for current deep learning methods in real-world deployments. The challenge of new task learning is often exacerbated by the scarcity of data for the new categories due to rarity or cost. Here we explore the important task of Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) and its extreme data scarcity condition of one-shot. An ideal FSCIL model needs to perform well on all classes, regardless of their presentation order or paucity of data. It also needs to be robust to open-set real-world conditions and be easily adapted to the new tasks that always arise in the field. In this paper, we first reevaluate the current task setting and propose a more comprehensive and practical setting for the FSCIL task. Then, inspired by the similarity of the goals for FSCIL and modern face recognition systems, we propose our method -- Augmented Angular Loss Incremental Classification or ALICE. In ALICE, instead of the commonly used cross-entropy loss, we propose to use the angular penalty loss to obtain well-clustered features. As the obtained features not only need to be compactly clustered but also diverse enough to maintain generalization for future incremental classes, we further discuss how class augmentation, data augmentation, and data balancing affect classification performance. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200, demonstrate the improved performance of ALICE over the state-of-the-art FSCIL methods.