Papers › Pre-trained Vision and Language Transformers Are Few-Shot Incremental Learners

Pre-trained Vision and Language Transformers Are Few-Shot Incremental Learners

2 Apr 2024CVPR 2024 1arXiv:2404.02117archive 2025-07-28

Keon-Hee Park, Kyungwoo Song, Gyeong-Moon Park

Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL) is a task that requires a model to learn new classes incrementally without forgetting when only a few samples for each class are given. FSCIL encounters two significant challenges: catastrophic forgetting and overfitting, and these challenges have driven prior studies to primarily rely on shallow models, such as ResNet-18. Even though their limited capacity can mitigate both forgetting and overfitting issues, it leads to inadequate knowledge transfer during few-shot incremental sessions. In this paper, we argue that large models such as vision and language transformers pre-trained on large datasets can be excellent few-shot incremental learners. To this end, we propose a novel FSCIL framework called PriViLege, Pre-trained Vision and Language transformers with prompting functions and knowledge distillation. Our framework effectively addresses the challenges of catastrophic forgetting and overfitting in large models through new pre-trained knowledge tuning (PKT) and two losses: entropy-based divergence loss and semantic knowledge distillation loss. Experimental results show that the proposed PriViLege significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods with a large margin, e.g., +9.38% in CUB200, +20.58% in CIFAR-100, and +13.36% in miniImageNet. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/KHU-AGI/PriViLege.

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conv1x1 KHU-AGI/PriViLege/models/resnet18_encoder.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · d9def42110729a85 · report
conv3x3 KHU-AGI/PriViLege/models/resnet18_encoder.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · 160bb14bd76201b4 · report
conv3x3 KHU-AGI/PriViLege/models/resnet20_cifar.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong MIT (permissive) · fac5364e2f53c6db · report
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im2col KHU-AGI/PriViLege/models/utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · f7bd6331d1ecd9d4 · report
im2col_from_conv KHU-AGI/PriViLege/models/utils.py official repository ran MIT (permissive) · 4bf8c74e32ceacec · report
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switch_module KHU-AGI/PriViLege/models/switch_module.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 02c87c5ca25b0326 · report

Tasks

Class Incremental LearningFew-Shot Class-Incremental LearningIncremental LearningKnowledge DistillationTransfer Learningclass-incremental learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning CIFAR-100 PriViLege Average Accuracy 88.08 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning CIFAR-100 PriViLege Last Accuracy 86.06 #1 of 11 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning CUB-200-2011 PriViLege (ViT-L) Average Accuracy 79.20 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning CUB-200-2011 PriViLege (ViT-L) Last Accuracy 76.43 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning CUB-200-2011 PriViLege Average Accuracy 77.50 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning CUB-200-2011 PriViLege Last Accuracy 75.08 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning mini-Imagenet PriViLege Average Accuracy 95.27 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning mini-Imagenet PriViLege Last Accuracy 94.10 #2 of 12 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Knowledge Distillation

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