# PrePrompt: Predictive prompting for class incremental learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08586/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08690/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with hard attention to the task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01423/) (2018)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13218/) (2022)
- [Class-incremental learning: survey and performance evaluation on image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15277/) (2020)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [Co2L: Contrastive Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14413/) (2021)
- [Class-Incremental Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03648/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Class-Incremental Learning with Pre-Trained Models: Generalizability and Adaptivity are All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07338/) (2023)
- [Continual Learning with Pre-Trained Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16386/) (2024)
- [A Unified Continual Learning Framework with General Parameter-Efficient Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10070/) (2023)
- [FeTrIL: Feature Translation for Exemplar-Free Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13131/) (2022)

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

- [RSICCLLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28266/) (2026)
- [Parameterized Prompt for Incremental Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.27316/) (2025)
- [Asymmetric Cross-Modal Fine-Grained Visual Categorization: ACF-Net and the BirdPro Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.25520/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) based on pre-trained models offers a promising direction for open-world continual learning. Existing methods typically rely on correlation-based strategies, where an image's classification feature is used as a query to retrieve the most related key prompts and select the corresponding value prompts for training. However, these approaches face an inherent limitation: fitting the entire feature space of all tasks with only a few trainable prompts is fundamentally challenging. We propose Predictive Prompting (PrePrompt), a novel CIL framework that circumvents correlation-based limitations by leveraging pre-trained models' natural classification ability to predict task-specific prompts. Specifically, PrePrompt decomposes CIL into a two-stage prediction framework: task-specific prompt prediction followed by label prediction. While theoretically appealing, this framework risks bias toward recent classes due to missing historical data for older classifier calibration. PrePrompt then mitigates this by incorporating feature translation, dynamically balancing stability and plasticity. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate PrePrompt's superiority over state-of-the-art prompt-based CIL methods. Code available at hrefgithub.com/libo-huang/prepromptgithub.com/libo-huang/preprompt.