Semantic-Guided Global-Local Collaborative Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) poses a critical challenge in machine learning, requiring models to continuously integrate novel classes with limited samples while preserving knowledge of previously seen classes. While existing FSCIL approaches have demonstrated promising results, they still suffer from catastrophic forgetting and few-shot overfitting due to the challenge of balancing old knowledge retention with new knowledge acquisition. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative Semantic-Guided Global-Local Collaborative Prompt Learning (SGLC) framework. Built upon powerful pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), the framework first introduces a dual-alignment mechanism: globally aligning visual features with visual-textual prototypes and locally aligning multi-view visual features with local textual attribute features, which facilitates effective knowledge learning while preserving existing knowledge via frozen prototypes of previous classes. Furthermore, to alleviate overfitting, we incorporate Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate semantically rich textual descriptions, which simultaneously guide both global and local prompt learning through knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments on the miniImageNet, CIFAR-100, and CUB200 datasets demonstrate that SGLC performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.