Papers › External Knowledge Injection for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning

External Knowledge Injection for CLIP-Based Class-Incremental Learning

11 Mar 2025arXiv:2503.08510archive 2025-07-28

Da-Wei Zhou, Kai-Wen Li, Jingyi Ning, Han-Jia Ye, Lijun Zhang, De-Chuan Zhan

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) enables learning systems to continuously adapt to evolving data streams. With the advancement of pre-training, leveraging pre-trained vision-language models (e.g., CLIP) offers a promising starting point for CIL. However, CLIP makes decisions by matching visual embeddings to class names, overlooking the rich contextual information conveyed through language. For instance, the concept of ``cat'' can be decomposed into features like tail, fur, and face for recognition. Besides, since the model is continually updated, these detailed features are overwritten in CIL, requiring external knowledge for compensation. In this paper, we introduce ExterNal knowledGe INjEction (ENGINE) for CLIP-based CIL. To enhance knowledge transfer from outside the dataset, we propose a dual-branch injection tuning framework that encodes informative knowledge from both visual and textual modalities. The visual branch is enhanced with data augmentation to enrich the visual features, while the textual branch leverages GPT-4 to rewrite discriminative descriptors. In addition to this on-the-fly knowledge injection, we also implement post-tuning knowledge by re-ranking the prediction results during inference. With the injected knowledge, the model can better capture informative features for downstream tasks as data evolves. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of ENGINE. Code is available at: https://github.com/RenaissCode/ENGINE

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g-u-n/pycil officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
renaisscode/engine officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
zhoudw-zdw/PROOF mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Class Incremental LearningData AugmentationIncremental LearningRe-RankingTransfer Learningclass-incremental learning

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPECLIPDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-4Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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