Generative Multi-modal Models are Good Class Incremental Learners

Xusheng Cao, Haori Lu, Linlan Huang, Xialei Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 28706-28717

In class incremental learning (CIL) scenarios the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting caused by the classifier's bias towards the current task has long posed a significant challenge. It is mainly caused by the characteristic of discriminative models. With the growing popularity of the generative multi-modal models we would explore replacing discriminative models with generative ones for CIL. However transitioning from discriminative to generative models requires addressing two key challenges. The primary challenge lies in transferring the generated textual information into the classification of distinct categories. Additionally it requires formulating the task of CIL within a generative framework. To this end we propose a novel generative multi-modal model (GMM) framework for class incremental learning. Our approach directly generates labels for images using an adapted generative model. After obtaining the detailed text we use a text encoder to extract text features and employ feature matching to determine the most similar label as the classification prediction. In the conventional CIL settings we achieve significantly better results in long-sequence task scenarios. Under the Few-shot CIL setting we have improved by at least 14% over the current state-of-the-art methods with significantly less forgetting.