# C3Box: A CLIP-based Class-Incremental Learning Toolbox

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20852 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20852/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (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)
- [FOSTER: Feature Boosting and Compression for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04662/) (2022)
- [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)
- [A Model or 603 Exemplars: Towards Memory-Efficient Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13218/) (2022)
- [Continual Learning with Pre-Trained Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16386/) (2024)
- [Expandable Subspace Ensemble for Pre-Trained Model-Based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12030/) (2024)
- [PyCIL: A Python Toolbox for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12533/) (2021)
- [Learning without Forgetting for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19270/) (2023)
- [PILOT: A Pre-Trained Model-Based Continual Learning Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07117/) (2023)
- [Class-Incremental Learning with CLIP: Adaptive Representation Adjustment and Parameter Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14143/) (2024)
- [Language Guided Concept Bottleneck Models for Interpretable Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23283/) (2025)
- [Integrating Task-Specific and Universal Adapters for Pre-Trained Model-based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08165/) (2025)
- [External Knowledge Injection for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08510/) (2025)
- [BOFA: Bridge-Layer Orthogonal Low-Rank Fusion for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11421/) (2025)
- [HERMAN: Hierarchical Representation Matching for CLIP-based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22645/) (2025)
- [Hierarchical Semantic Tree Anchoring for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.15633/) (2025)

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

- [Unlocking Patch-Level Features for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13835/) (2026)
- [AREA: Attribute Extraction and Aggregation for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28809/) (2026)
- [Visual Branch is What You Need for CLIP-based Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37888/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Traditional machine learning systems are typically designed for static data distributions, which suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning from evolving data streams. Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) addresses this challenge by enabling learning systems to continuously learn new classes while preserving prior knowledge. With the rise of pre-trained models (PTMs) such as CLIP, leveraging their strong generalization and semantic alignment capabilities has become a promising direction in CIL. However, existing CLIP-based CIL methods are often scattered across disparate codebases, rely on inconsistent configurations, hindering fair comparisons, reproducibility, and practical adoption. Therefore, we propose C3Box (CLIP-based Class-inCremental learning toolBOX), a modular and comprehensive Python toolbox. C3Box integrates representative traditional CIL methods, ViT-based CIL methods, and state-of-the-art CLIP-based CIL methods into a unified CLIP-based framework. By inheriting the streamlined design of PyCIL, C3Box provides a JSON-based configuration and standardized execution pipeline. This design enables reproducible experimentation with low engineering overhead and makes C3Box a reliable benchmark platform for continual learning research. Designed to be user-friendly, C3Box relies only on widely used open-source libraries and supports major operating systems. The code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-CL/C3Box.