# Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning with Non-IID Decentralized Data

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11657 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11657/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 46 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Federated Optimization in Heterogeneous Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.06127/) (2018)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (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)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Large Scale Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13260/) (2019)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09536/) (2018)
- [Federated Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02079/) (2021)
- [Symmetric Cross Entropy for Robust Learning with Noisy Labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06112/) (2019)
- [Class-incremental learning: survey and performance evaluation on image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15277/) (2020)
- [Dreaming to Distill: Data-free Knowledge Transfer via DeepInversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08795/) (2019)
- [Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Heterogeneous Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10056/) (2021)
- [DER: Dynamically Expandable Representation for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16788/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10956/) (2020)
- [FOSTER: Feature Boosting and Compression for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04662/) (2022)
- [Data-Free Learning of Student Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01186/) (2019)
- [Few-Shot Incremental Learning with Continually Evolved Classifiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03047/) (2021)
- [Fine-tuning Global Model via Data-Free Knowledge Distillation for Non-IID Federated Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09249/) (2022)
- [Federated Continual Learning with Weighted Inter-client Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03196/) (2020)
- [A Model or 603 Exemplars: Towards Memory-Efficient Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13218/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Few-shot class-incremental learning is crucial for developing scalable and adaptive intelligent systems, as it enables models to acquire new classes with minimal annotated data while safeguarding the previously accumulated knowledge. Nonetheless, existing methods deal with continuous data streams in a centralized manner, limiting their applicability in scenarios that prioritize data privacy and security. To this end, this paper introduces federated few-shot class-incremental learning, a decentralized machine learning paradigm tailored to progressively learn new classes from scarce data distributed across multiple clients. In this learning paradigm, clients locally update their models with new classes while preserving data privacy, and then transmit the model updates to a central server where they are aggregated globally. However, this paradigm faces several issues, such as difficulties in few-shot learning, catastrophic forgetting, and data heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we present a synthetic data-driven framework that leverages replay buffer data to maintain existing knowledge and facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge. Within this framework, a noise-aware generative replay module is developed to fine-tune local models with a balance of new and replay data, while generating synthetic data of new classes to further expand the replay buffer for future tasks. Furthermore, a class-specific weighted aggregation strategy is designed to tackle data heterogeneity by adaptively aggregating class-specific parameters based on local models performance on synthetic data. This enables effective global model optimization without direct access to client data. Comprehensive experiments across three widely-used datasets underscore the effectiveness and preeminence of the introduced framework.