Self-Promoted Prototype Refinement for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Kai Zhu, Yang Cao, Wei Zhai, Jie Cheng, Zheng-Jun Zha; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2021, pp. 6801-6810

Few-shot class-incremental learning is to recognize the new classes given few samples and not forget the old classes. It is a challenging task since representation optimization and prototype reorganization can only be achieved under little supervision. To address this problem, we propose a novel incremental prototype learning scheme. Our scheme consists of a random episode selection strategy that adapts the feature representation to various generated incremental episodes to enhance the corresponding extensibility, and a self-promoted prototype refinement mechanism which strengthens the expression ability of the new class by explicitly considering the dependencies among different classes. Particularly, a dynamic relation projection module is proposed to calculate the relation matrix in a shared embedding space and leverage it as the factor for bootstrapping the update of prototypes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the above-par incremental performance, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by a margin of 13%, 17% and 11%, respectively.