# Class Incremental Learning via Likelihood Ratio Based Task Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.15048 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15048/

## Key facts

- Cited by 19 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 73 of its 95 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Dropout as a Bayesian Approximation: Representing Model Uncertainty in Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02142/) (2015)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [CutMix: Regularization Strategy to Train Strong Classifiers with Localizable Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04899/) (2019)
- [A Baseline for Detecting Misclassified and Out-of-Distribution Examples in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02136/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [A Simple Unified Framework for Detecting Out-of-Distribution Samples and Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03888/) (2018)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02690/) (2017)
- [Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03759/) (2020)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [Deep Anomaly Detection with Outlier Exposure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04606/) (2018)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [PackNet: Adding Multiple Tasks to a Single Network by Iterative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05769/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with hard attention to the task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01423/) (2018)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection with Deep Nearest Neighbors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06507/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09536/) (2018)
- [Towards Open Set Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06233/) (2015)
- [ReAct: Out-of-distribution Detection With Rectified Activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12797/) (2021)
- [Scaling Out-of-Distribution Detection for Real-World Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11132/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Selecting Large Language Model to Fine-tune via Rectified Scaling Law](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02314/) (2024)
- [Continual Learning Using a Kernel-Based Method Over Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15571/) (2024)
- [Learning More Generalized Experts by Merging Experts in Mixture-of-Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11530/) (2024)
- [Replay-and-Forget-Free Graph Class-Incremental Learning: A Task Profiling and Prompting Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10341/) (2024)
- [Multi-Granularity Class Prototype Topology Distillation for Class-Incremental Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16064/) (2024)
- [PASS++: A Dual Bias Reduction Framework for Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14029/) (2024)
- [On the Discrimination and Consistency for Exemplar-Free Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15454/) (2025)
- [AnaCP: Toward Upper-Bound Continual Learning via Analytic Contrastive Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13880/) (2025)
- [CLoG: Benchmarking Continual Learning of Image Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04584/) (2024)
- [Active Learning for Continual Learning: Keeping the Past Alive in the Present](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.14278/) (2025)
- [DESIRE: Dynamic Knowledge Consolidation for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19154/) (2024)
- [Achieving Upper Bound Accuracy of Joint Training in Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12388/) (2025)
- [Reducing Class-wise Confusion for Incremental Learning with Disentangled Manifolds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17677/) (2025)
- [Buffer-free Class-Incremental Learning with Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23412/) (2025)
- [ResidualDroppath: Enhancing Feature Reuse over Residual Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09475/) (2024)
- [GR4CIL: Gap-compensated Routing for CLIP-based Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17822/) (2026)
- [Continual Video-MLLM Adaptation over Evolving Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18716/) (2026)
- [Distribution-Conditioned Task Routing for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34503/) (2026)
- [SPARS: A Stability-Plasticity-Aware Region Selection Framework for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.19876/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Class incremental learning (CIL) is a challenging setting of continual learning, which learns a series of tasks sequentially. Each task consists of a set of unique classes. The key feature of CIL is that no task identifier (or task-id) is provided at test time. Predicting the task-id for each test sample is a challenging problem. An emerging theory-guided approach (called TIL+OOD) is to train a task-specific model for each task in a shared network for all tasks based on a task-incremental learning (TIL) method to deal with catastrophic forgetting. The model for each task is an out-of-distribution (OOD) detector rather than a conventional classifier. The OOD detector can perform both within-task (in-distribution (IND)) class prediction and OOD detection. The OOD detection capability is the key to task-id prediction during inference. However, this paper argues that using a traditional OOD detector for task-id prediction is sub-optimal because additional information (e.g., the replay data and the learned tasks) available in CIL can be exploited to design a better and principled method for task-id prediction. We call the new method TPL (Task-id Prediction based on Likelihood Ratio). TPL markedly outperforms strong CIL baselines and has negligible catastrophic forgetting. The code of TPL is publicly available at https://github.com/linhaowei1/TPL.