Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning via Adaptive Old Class Reconstruction

In the Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) task, rehearsal-based approaches have received a lot of attention recently. However, storing old class samples is often infeasible in application scenarios where device memory is insufficient or data privacy is important. Therefore, it is necessary to rethink Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning (NECIL). In this paper, we propose a novel NECIL method named POLO with an adaPtive Old cLass recOnstruction mechanism, in which a density-based prototype reinforcement method (DBR), a topology-correction prototype adaptation method (TPA), and an adaptive prototype augmentation method (APA) are designed to reconstruct pseudo features of old classes in new incremental sessions. Specifically, the DBR focuses on the low-density features to maintain the model's discriminative ability for old classes. Afterward, the TPA is designed to adapt old class prototypes to new feature spaces in the incremental learning process. Finally, the APA is developed to further adapt pseudo feature spaces of old classes to new feature spaces. Experimental evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art NECIL methods.