Cited by 3,988Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningData Stream Mining TechniquesAdvanced Neural Network Applications

iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning

Open access
Rebuffi, Sylvestre-Alvise, Kolesnikov, Alexander, Sperl, Georg, Lampert, Christoph H.·2017·2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)

Abstract

A major open problem on the road to artificial intelligence is the development of incrementally learning systems that learn about more and more concepts over time from a stream of data. In this work, we introduce a new training strategy, iCaRL, that allows learning in such a class-incremental way: only the training data for a small number of classes has to be present at the same time and new classes can be added progressively. iCaRL learns strong classifiers and a data representation simultaneously. This distinguishes it from earlier works that were fundamentally limited to fixed data representations and therefore incompatible with deep learning architectures. We show by experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet ILSVRC 2012 data that iCaRL can learn many classes incrementally over a long period of time where other strategies quickly fail.

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Crossref · 10.1109/cvpr.2017.587

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  • The reuse of initial layers is not done in FR [56] and results are suboptimal.

    “Unfortunately, the reuse of initial layers, is not done in [56] and results are suboptimal.”

    From A Comprehensive Study of Class Incremental Learning Algorithms for Visual Tasks (2020) · cites this paper as [56]

    The representation-learning description (p. 4) says iCaRL starts from previously learned network weights and updates them, contrary to the claim that it does not reuse initial layers. The Results (p. 7) also report that iCaRL outperforms the comparison methods, rather than describing its results as suboptimal. (LLM, conf=0.82)

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    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • FR does not need a bounded memory for the update.

    “The method does not need a bounded memory for the update.”

    From A Comprehensive Study of Class Incremental Learning Algorithms for Visual Tasks (2020) · cites this paper as [56]

    If the cited method is iCaRL, the paper says the opposite. Section 2.4 (p. 4) states that its stored exemplars never exceed a memory budget of K, and the representation-learning discussion (p. 4) says those exemplars are used during updates. The copy does not identify a method called FR. (LLM, conf=0.84)

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    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • iCaRL introduces a bounded memory to enable efficient replay, which is its main difference from LwF.

    “The main difference with LwF is the introduction of a bounded memory to enable efficient replay.”

    From A Comprehensive Study of Class Incremental Learning Algorithms for Visual Tasks (2020) · cites this paper as [56]

    Related Work (p. 6) says iCaRL rehearses with stored exemplars, while Results (p. 7) describes its LwF-like comparator as having no exemplar set. Exemplar Management (p. 4) confirms a fixed exemplar budget. But the paper does not identify bounded-memory replay as the main difference from LwF: Related Work also distinguishes their prediction settings, and the Conclusion (p. 9) names other main components of iCaRL. (LLM, conf=0.85)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • Fixed-representation based IL algorithms do not update the model but are less dependent on memory than fine-tuning based algorithms.

    “We also present results with fixedrepresentation based algorithms [6, 23, 24, 56], which do not update the model but are also less dependent on memory.”

    From A Comprehensive Study of Class Incremental Learning Algorithms for Visual Tasks (2020) · cites this paper as [56]

    The Results (p. 6) say the fixed-representation method freezes its feature representation and previously learned classifier weights, but trains weights for new classes. Thus it does update part of the model. Related Work (p. 5) discusses fixed-representation methods that need not retain all past training data, but does not establish the claimed memory comparison with fine-tuning methods. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The frozen model in FR is a limitation but also an advantage in that it allows the reuse of initial classifier layers, learned with all images, throughout the entire incremental process.

    “The frozen model is a limitation but also an advantage in that it allows the reuse of initial classifier layers, learned with all images, throughout the entire incremental process.”

    From A Comprehensive Study of Class Incremental Learning Algorithms for Visual Tasks (2020) · cites this paper as [56]

    The Results section (p. 6) says the fixed-representation method freezes its feature representation after the first batch and retains classification weights for classes already processed, training only new-class weights thereafter. This supports reuse of the initial layers, but the paper does not say those layers were learned with all images across the incremental process; it specifies the first batch of classes. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

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Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. [18][18] C. H. Lampert, H. Nickisch, and S. Harmeling. Attributebased classification for zero-shot visual object categorization. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI) , 2013. 5 -
  2. [19][19] Y. LeCun, L. Bottou, Y. Bengio, and P. Haffner. Gradientbased learning applied to document recognition. Proceedings of the IEEE , 86(11), 1998. 2 -
  3. [25][25] I. Misra, A. Shrivastava, A. Gupta, and M. Hebert. Crossstitch networks for multi-task learning. In Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) , 2016. 5 -
  4. [38][38] W. J. Scheirer, A. Rocha, A. Sapkota, and T. E. Boult. Towards open set recognition. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (T-PAMI) , 36, 2013. 5 -

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Authors
Rebuffi, S.-A., Kolesnikov, A., Sperl, G., & Lampert, C. H.
Affiliations
Institute of Science and Technology Austria (AT)
Venue
2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Publisher
IEEE
Published
2017-07
Pages
5533-5542
ISSN
1063-6919 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2554863749
Cited by
3,988
References
48
Citations by year
2026: 442 · 2025: 727 · 2024: 777 · 2023: 701 · 2022: 499 · 2021: 435 · 2020: 229 · 2019: 131 · 2018: 44 · 2017: 3
FWCI
50.77
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings - IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition/Proceedings (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • Nvidia (Tesla K40)
  • European Commission (2007–2013, FP7 2007-2013, 308036, FP7/2007)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Data Stream Mining Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
Keywords
incremental learning, class-incremental learning, representation learning, data stream learning, classifier training, catastrophic forgetting, deep learning

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