Pre-trained Vision and Language Transformers Are Few-Shot Incremental Learners
This addresses catastrophic forgetting and overfitting in incremental learning for AI systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing transformer and prompting methods.
The paper tackles the problem of few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) by proposing a framework using pre-trained vision and language transformers, achieving significant performance gains such as +9.38% on CUB200 and +20.58% on CIFAR-100.
Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL) is a task that requires a model to learn new classes incrementally without forgetting when only a few samples for each class are given. FSCIL encounters two significant challenges: catastrophic forgetting and overfitting, and these challenges have driven prior studies to primarily rely on shallow models, such as ResNet-18. Even though their limited capacity can mitigate both forgetting and overfitting issues, it leads to inadequate knowledge transfer during few-shot incremental sessions. In this paper, we argue that large models such as vision and language transformers pre-trained on large datasets can be excellent few-shot incremental learners. To this end, we propose a novel FSCIL framework called PriViLege, Pre-trained Vision and Language transformers with prompting functions and knowledge distillation. Our framework effectively addresses the challenges of catastrophic forgetting and overfitting in large models through new pre-trained knowledge tuning (PKT) and two losses: entropy-based divergence loss and semantic knowledge distillation loss. Experimental results show that the proposed PriViLege significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods with a large margin, e.g., +9.38% in CUB200, +20.58% in CIFAR-100, and +13.36% in miniImageNet. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/KHU-AGI/PriViLege.