提出双向对齐方法,缓解无样本增量学习中的遗忘问题。
Two-Way Is Better Than One: Bidirectional Alignment with Cycle Consistency for Exemplar-Free Class-Incremental Learning

- 设计双向投影机制,同时优化新旧类间映射关系。
- 在多个基准上显著降低遗忘率,提升分类准确率。
- 适合追求高效、无样本增量学习的模型部署场景。
持续学习(CL)旨在让模型在不遗忘旧知识的前提下习得新技能。在无样本类别增量学习(EFCIL)中,由于无法存储历史数据,旧类别表征漂移尤为严重。基于原型的EFCIL虽具效率优势,但原型随嵌入空间演化而漂移;现有投影补偿方法多为单向,引入系统性偏差:要么扭曲当前特征几何,要么仅局部对齐旧类别,导致循环不一致累积。本文提出BiCyc,一种具有循环一致性目标的双向投影对齐方法。通过联合优化旧到新、新到旧两个映射,并使用梯度截断门控,使表征与传输共同演化。理论上,循环损失将白化空间中的奇异谱收缩至单位值,提升了类别均值与协方差的传输精度,从而减小分类对数几率扰动,保护旧类别决策,缓解灾难性遗忘。实验表明,在标准EFCIL基准上,BiCyc在从头训练设置下显著减少遗忘并提升准确率,且在预训练微调场景下保持竞争力。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Continual learning (CL) seeks models that acquire new skills without erasing prior knowledge. In exemplar-free class-incremental learning (EFCIL), this challenge is amplified because past data cannot be stored, making representation drift for old classes particularly harmful. Prototype-based EFCIL is attractive for its efficiency, yet prototypes drift as the embedding space evolves; therefore, projection-based drift compensation has become a popular remedy. We show, however, that existing one-directional projections introduce systematic bias: they either retroactively distort the current feature geometry or align past classes only locally, leaving cycle inconsistencies that accumulate across tasks. We introduce BiCyc, a bidirectional projector alignment approach with a cycle-consistency objective. BiCyc jointly optimizes two maps, old-to-new and new-to-old, with stop-gradient gating so that transport and representation co-evolve. Analytically, we show that the cycle loss contracts the singular spectrum toward unity in whitened space, and that improved transport of class means and covariances yields smaller perturbations of classification log-odds, preserving old-class decisions and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Empirically, across standard EFCIL benchmarks, BiCyc substantially reduces forgetting and improves accuracy in from-scratch settings, while remaining competitive in the pretrained fine-grained regime.
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