MetaFSCIL: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

Zhixiang Chi, Li Gu, Huan Liu, Yang Wang, Yuanhao Yu, Jin Tang; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 14166-14175

In this paper, we tackle the problem of few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL). FSCIL aims to incrementally learn new classes with only a few samples in each class. Most existing methods only consider the incremental steps at test time. The learning objective of these methods is often hand-engineered and is not directly tied to the objective (i.e. incrementally learning new classes) during testing. Those methods are sub-optimal due to the misalignment between the training objectives and what the methods are expected to do during evaluation. In this work, we proposed a bi-level optimization based on meta-learning to directly optimize the network to learn how to incrementally learn in the setting of FSCIL. Concretely, we propose to sample sequences of incremental tasks from base classes for training to simulate the evaluation protocol. For each task, the model is learned using a meta-objective such that it is capable to perform fast adaptation without forgetting. Furthermore, we propose a bi-directional guided modulation, which is learned to automatically modulate the activations to reduce catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the baseline and achieves the state-of-the-art results on CIFAR100, MiniImageNet, and CUB200 datasets.