# Class-Incremental Learning of Plant and Disease Detection: Growing Branches with Knowledge Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.06619 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06619/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Detection and dense prediction distillation, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 16 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Apr 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Detection and dense prediction distillation](https://mlsanity.com/distill/detection-and-dense-prediction-distillation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [A Survey of Convolutional Neural Networks: Analysis, Applications, and Prospects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02806/) (2020)
- [Incremental Learning of Object Detectors without Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06977/) (2017)
- [Modeling the Background for Incremental Learning in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00718/) (2020)
- [PLOP: Learning without Forgetting for Continual Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11390/) (2020)
- [RECALL: Replay-based Continual Learning in Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03673/) (2021)
- [Rehearsal revealed: The limits and merits of revisiting samples in continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07446/) (2021)
- [Faster ILOD: Incremental Learning for Object Detectors based on Faster RCNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03901/) (2020)
- [Continual Object Detection: A review of definitions, strategies, and challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15445/) (2022)
- [Modeling Missing Annotations for Incremental Learning in Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08766/) (2022)
- [Active learning with MaskAL reduces annotation effort for training Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06586/) (2021)
- [Dynamic Y-KD: A Hybrid Approach to Continual Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06015/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Applications of Knowledge Distillation in Remote Sensing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12111/) (2024)
- [Learning to Synergize Semantic and Geometric Priors for Limited-Data Wheat Disease Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05415/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper investigates the problem of class-incremental object detection for agricultural applications where a model needs to learn new plant species and diseases incrementally without forgetting the previously learned ones. We adapt two public datasets to include new categories over time, simulating a more realistic and dynamic scenario. We then compare three class-incremental learning methods that leverage different forms of knowledge distillation to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Our experiments show that all three methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting, but the Dynamic Y-KD approach, which additionally uses a dynamic architecture that grows new branches to learn new tasks, outperforms ILOD and Faster-ILOD in most settings both on new and old classes. These results highlight the challenges and opportunities of continual object detection for agricultural applications. In particular, we hypothesize that the large intra-class and small inter-class variability that is typical of plant images exacerbate the difficulty of learning new categories without interfering with previous knowledge. We publicly release our code to encourage future work.