Enhanced Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning via Ensemble Models
This addresses the challenge of overfitting in incremental learning with limited data, which is incremental as it builds on existing FSCIL methods.
The paper tackles the overfitting problem in few-shot class-incremental learning by proposing an ensemble model framework with data augmentation and self-supervised learning, resulting in outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to continually fit new classes with limited training data, while maintaining the performance of previously learned classes. The main challenges are overfitting the rare new training samples and forgetting old classes. While catastrophic forgetting has been extensively studied, the overfitting problem has attracted less attention in FSCIL. To tackle overfitting challenge, we design a new ensemble model framework cooperated with data augmentation to boost generalization. In this way, the enhanced model works as a library storing abundant features to guarantee fast adaptation to downstream tasks. Specifically, the multi-input multi-output ensemble structure is applied with a spatial-aware data augmentation strategy, aiming at diversifying the feature extractor and alleviating overfitting in incremental sessions. Moreover, self-supervised learning is also integrated to further improve the model generalization. Comprehensive experimental results show that the proposed method can indeed mitigate the overfitting problem in FSCIL, and outperform the state-of-the-art methods.