Incremental few-shot learning via implanting and consolidating

This work focuses on tackling the challenging but realistic visual task of Incremental Few-Shot Learning (IFSL), which requires a model to continually learn novel classes from only a few examples while not forgetting the base classes on which it was pre-trained. Our study reveals that the challenges of IFSL lie in both inter-class separation and novel-class representation. Due to intra-class variation, a novel class may implicitly leverage the knowledge from multiple base classes to construct its feature representation. Hence, simply reusing the pre-trained embedding space could lead to a scattered feature distribution and result in category confusion. To address such issues, we propose a two-step learning strategy referred to as Implanting and Compressing (IMCO), which optimizes both feature space partition and novel class reconstruction in a systematic manner. Specifically, in the Implanting step, we propose to mimic the data distribution of novel classes with the assistance of data-abundant base set, so that a model could learn semantically-rich features that are beneficial for discriminating between the base and other unseen classes. In the Consolidating step, we adapt the feature extractor to precisely represent each novel class for enhancing intra-class compactness, together with a regularized parameter updating rule for preventing aggressive model updating. Finally, we demonstrate that IMCO outperforms competing baselines with a significant margin on widely used benchmarks.