# Annotation-Free Class-Incremental Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19344 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19344/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

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

- [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)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Describing Textures in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.3618/) (2013)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Zero-Shot Generalization in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07511/) (2022)
- [Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18293/) (2024)
- [CLIP model is an Efficient Continual Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03114/) (2022)
- [Class-Incremental Learning with CLIP: Adaptive Representation Adjustment and Parameter Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14143/) (2024)
- [LaFTer: Label-Free Tuning of Zero-shot Classifier using Language and Unlabeled Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18287/) (2023)
- [Synthetic Data is an Elegant GIFT for Continual Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04229/) (2025)
- [CLIP meets DINO for Tuning Zero-Shot Classifier using Unlabeled Image Collections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19346/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite significant progress in continual learning ranging from architectural novelty to clever strategies for mitigating catastrophic forgetting most existing methods rest on a strong but unrealistic assumption the availability of labeled data throughout the learning process. In real-world scenarios, however, data often arrives sequentially and without annotations, rendering conventional approaches impractical. In this work, we revisit the fundamental assumptions of continual learning and ask: Can current systems adapt when labels are absent and tasks emerge incrementally over time? To this end, we introduce Annotation-Free Class-Incremental Learning (AFCIL), a more realistic and challenging paradigm where unlabeled data arrives continuously, and the learner must incrementally acquire new classes without any supervision. To enable effective learning under AFCIL, we propose CrossWorld CL, a Cross Domain World Guided Continual Learning framework that incorporates external world knowledge as a stable auxiliary source. The method retrieves semantically related ImageNet classes for each downstream category, maps downstream and ImageNet features through a cross domain alignment strategy and finally introduce a novel replay strategy. This design lets the model uncover semantic structure without annotations while keeping earlier knowledge intact. Across four datasets, CrossWorld-CL surpasses CLIP baselines and existing continual and unlabeled learning methods, underscoring the benefit of world knowledge for annotation free continual learning.