Papers › An Adaptive Random Path Selection Approach for Incremental Learning

An Adaptive Random Path Selection Approach for Incremental Learning

3 Jun 2019arXiv:1906.01120archive 2025-07-28

Jathushan Rajasegaran, Munawar Hayat, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ling Shao, Ming-Hsuan Yang

In a conventional supervised learning setting, a machine learning model has access to examples of all object classes that are desired to be recognized during the inference stage. This results in a fixed model that lacks the flexibility to adapt to new learning tasks. In practical settings, learning tasks often arrive in a sequence and the models must continually learn to increment their previously acquired knowledge. Existing incremental learning approaches fall well below the state-of-the-art cumulative models that use all training classes at once. In this paper, we propose a random path selection algorithm, called Adaptive RPS-Net, that progressively chooses optimal paths for the new tasks while encouraging parameter sharing between tasks. We introduce a new network capacity measure that enables us to automatically switch paths if the already used resources are saturated. Since the proposed path-reuse strategy ensures forward knowledge transfer, our approach is efficient and has considerably less computation overhead. As an added novelty, the proposed model integrates knowledge distillation and retrospection along with the path selection strategy to overcome catastrophic forgetting. In order to maintain an equilibrium between previous and newly acquired knowledge, we propose a simple controller to dynamically balance the model plasticity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the Adaptive RPS-Net method surpasses the state-of-the-art performance for incremental learning and by utilizing parallel computation this method can run in constant time with nearly the same efficiency as a conventional deep convolutional neural network.

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Code

brjathu/RPSnet officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Incremental LearningKnowledge DistillationTransfer Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Incremental Learning CIFAR-100-B0(5steps of 20 classes) RPSNet Average Incremental Accuracy 70.50 #8 of 10 Archive leaderboard report
Incremental Learning ImageNet100 - 10 steps RPSNet Average Incremental Accuracy Top-5 87.90 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report
Incremental Learning ImageNet100 - 10 steps RPSNet Final Accuracy Top-5 74.00 #12 of 13 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Knowledge Distillation

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