Papers › CLOSER: Towards Better Representation Learning for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

CLOSER: Towards Better Representation Learning for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

8 Oct 2024arXiv:2410.05627archive 2025-07-28

Junghun Oh, Sungyong Baik, Kyoung Mu Lee

Aiming to incrementally learn new classes with only few samples while preserving the knowledge of base (old) classes, few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) faces several challenges, such as overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. Such a challenging problem is often tackled by fixing a feature extractor trained on base classes to reduce the adverse effects of overfitting and forgetting. Under such formulation, our primary focus is representation learning on base classes to tackle the unique challenge of FSCIL: simultaneously achieving the transferability and the discriminability of the learned representation. Building upon the recent efforts for enhancing transferability, such as promoting the spread of features, we find that trying to secure the spread of features within a more confined feature space enables the learned representation to strike a better balance between transferability and discriminability. Thus, in stark contrast to prior beliefs that the inter-class distance should be maximized, we claim that the closer different classes are, the better for FSCIL. The empirical results and analysis from the perspective of information bottleneck theory justify our simple yet seemingly counter-intuitive representation learning method, raising research questions and suggesting alternative research directions. The code is available at https://github.com/JungHunOh/CLOSER_ECCV2024.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

junghunoh/closer_eccv2024 officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Class Incremental LearningFew-Shot Class-Incremental LearningIncremental LearningRepresentation Learningclass-incremental learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

BASEFocus

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections