# DRL: Discriminative Representation Learning with Parallel Adapters for Class Incremental Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12107 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12107/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [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)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09601/) (2017)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (2019)
- [Progress & Compress: A scalable framework for continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06370/) (2018)
- [CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13218/) (2022)
- [A Large-scale Study of Representation Learning with the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04867/) (2019)
- [Expert Gate: Lifelong Learning with a Network of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06194/) (2016)
- [DER: Dynamically Expandable Representation for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16788/) (2021)
- [DyTox: Transformers for Continual Learning with DYnamic TOken eXpansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11326/) (2021)
- [Maintaining Discrimination and Fairness in Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07053/) (2019)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [Semantic Drift Compensation for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00440/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the excellent representation capabilities of Pre-Trained Models (PTMs), remarkable progress has been made in non-rehearsal Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) research. However, it remains an extremely challenging task due to three conundrums: increasingly large model complexity, non-smooth representation shift during incremental learning and inconsistency between stage-wise sub-problem optimization and global inference. In this work, we propose the Discriminative Representation Learning (DRL) framework to specifically address these challenges. To conduct incremental learning effectively and yet efficiently, the DRL's network, called Incremental Parallel Adapter (IPA) network, is built upon a PTM and increasingly augments the model by learning a lightweight adapter with a small amount of parameter learning overhead in each incremental stage. The adapter is responsible for adapting the model to new classes, it can inherit and propagate the representation capability from the current model through parallel connection between them by a transfer gate. As a result, this design guarantees a smooth representation shift between different incremental stages. Furthermore, to alleviate inconsistency and enable comparable feature representations across incremental stages, we design the Decoupled Anchor Supervision (DAS). It decouples constraints of positive and negative samples by respectively comparing them with the virtual anchor. This decoupling promotes discriminative representation learning and aligns the feature spaces learned at different stages, thereby narrowing the gap between stage-wise local optimization over a subset of data and global inference across all classes. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks reveal that our DRL consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods throughout the entire CIL period while maintaining high efficiency in both training and inference phases.