# Reducing Catastrophic Forgetting in Online Class Incremental Learning Using Self-Distillation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11329 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11329/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Distillation for continual learning, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 18 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Distillation for continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/distill/distillation-for-continual-learning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [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)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [PackNet: Adding Multiple Tasks to a Single Network by Iterative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05769/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Investigation of Catastrophic Forgetting in Gradient-Based Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6211/) (2013)
- [Three scenarios for continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07734/) (2019)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (2019)
- [Online Continual Learning with Maximally Interfered Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04742/) (2019)
- [Online Continual Learning in Image Classification: An Empirical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10423/) (2021)
- [Supervised Contrastive Replay: Revisiting the Nearest Class Mean Classifier in Online Class-Incremental Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13885/) (2021)

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

- [Leveraging Lightweight Generators for Memory Efficient Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19692/) (2025)
- [Decoupling Knowledge and Privacy: Post-Task Self-Distillation Replay for LLM Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29711/) (2026)
- [Formalizing Forgetting: Theory of Forgetting for Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14787/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In continual learning, there is a serious problem of catastrophic forgetting, in which previous knowledge is forgotten when a model learns new tasks. Various methods have been proposed to solve this problem. Replay methods which replay data from previous tasks in later training, have shown good accuracy. However, replay methods have a generalizability problem from a limited memory buffer. In this paper, we tried to solve this problem by acquiring transferable knowledge through self-distillation using highly generalizable output in shallow layer as a teacher. Furthermore, when we deal with a large number of classes or challenging data, there is a risk of learning not converging and not experiencing overfitting. Therefore, we attempted to achieve more efficient and thorough learning by prioritizing the storage of easily misclassified samples through a new method of memory update. We confirmed that our proposed method outperformed conventional methods by experiments on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and MiniimageNet datasets.