Compress to One Point: Neural Collapse for Pre-Trained Model-Based Class-Incremental Learning

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) requires an artificial intelligence system to learn different tasks without class overlaps continually. To achieve CIL, some methods introduce the Pre-Trained Model (PTM) and leverage the generalized feature representation of PTM to learn downstream incremental tasks continually. However, the generalized feature representations of PTM are not adaptive and discriminative for these various incremental classes, which may be out of distribution for the pre-trained dataset. In addition, since the incremental classes cannot be learned at once, the class relationship cannot be constructed optimally, leading to undiscriminating feature representation for understream tasks. Thus, we propose a novel Pre-Trained Model-based Class-Incremental Learning (PTM-CIL) method to explore the potential of PTM and obtain optimal class relationships. Inspired by Neural Collapse theory, we introduce the frozen Equiangular Tight Frame classifier to construct optimal classifier structure for all seen classes, guiding the feature representation adaptation for downstream continual tasks. Specifically, Task-Related Adaptation is proposed to modulate the generalized feature representation to bridge the gap between the pre-trained dataset and various downstream datasets. Then, the Feature Compression Module is introduced to compress various features to the specific classifier weights, constructing the feature transfer pattern and satisfying the characteristic of Neural Collapse. Optimal Structural Alignment is designed to supervise the feature compression process, assisting in achieving optimal class relationships across different tasks. Sufficient experiments on seven datasets prove the effectiveness of our method.