# Semantic-visual Guided Transformer for Few-shot Class-incremental Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.15494 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15494/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [Self-supervised Learning: Generative or Contrastive](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08218/) (2020)
- [A Survey on Visual Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12556/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10956/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Incremental Learning with Continually Evolved Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03047/) (2021)
- [Forward Compatible Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06953/) (2022)
- [Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Incremental Few-Shot Learning by Finding Flat Minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01549/) (2021)
- [Neural Collapse Inspired Feature-Classifier Alignment for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03004/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Constrained Few-shot Class-incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16588/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning by Sampling Multi-Phase Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17030/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning from an Open-Set Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00147/) (2022)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning via Entropy-Regularized Data-Free Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.11213/) (2022)
- [MgSvF: Multi-Grained Slow vs. Fast Framework for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15524/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Lifelong Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00991/) (2021)
- [Subspace Regularizers for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07059/) (2021)
- [DeepEMD: Differentiable Earth Mover's Distance for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06777/) (2020)
- [On the Soft-Subnetwork for Few-shot Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07529/) (2022)
- [Generalized and Incremental Few-Shot Learning by Explicit Learning and Calibration without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08165/) (2021)
- [Memorizing Complementation Network for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05610/) (2022)
- [SEGA: Semantic Guided Attention on Visual Prototype for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.04316/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Image-Object-Specific Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02833/) (2023)
- [Consistency-Guided Asynchronous Contrastive Tuning for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Tuning of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16625/) (2024)
- [Few-shot Class-Incremental Learning via Generative Co-Memory Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07117/) (2026)
- [AggSS: An Aggregated Self-Supervised Approach for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04347/) (2024)
- [Brain-inspired analogical mixture prototypes for few-shot class-incremental learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18923/) (2025)
- [An experimental approach on Few Shot Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11349/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) has recently attracted extensive attention in various areas. Existing FSCIL methods highly depend on the robustness of the feature backbone pre-trained on base classes. In recent years, different Transformer variants have obtained significant processes in the feature representation learning of massive fields. Nevertheless, the progress of the Transformer in FSCIL scenarios has not achieved the potential promised in other fields so far. In this paper, we develop a semantic-visual guided Transformer (SV-T) to enhance the feature extracting capacity of the pre-trained feature backbone on incremental classes. Specifically, we first utilize the visual (image) labels provided by the base classes to supervise the optimization of the Transformer. And then, a text encoder is introduced to automatically generate the corresponding semantic (text) labels for each image from the base classes. Finally, the constructed semantic labels are further applied to the Transformer for guiding its hyperparameters updating. Our SV-T can take full advantage of more supervision information from base classes and further enhance the training robustness of the feature backbone. More importantly, our SV-T is an independent method, which can directly apply to the existing FSCIL architectures for acquiring embeddings of various incremental classes. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks, two FSCIL architectures, and two Transformer variants show that our proposed SV-T obtains a significant improvement in comparison to the existing state-of-the-art FSCIL methods.