On the Soft-Subnetwork for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

Haeyong Kang, Jaehong Yoon, Sultan Rizky Hikmawan Madjid, Sung Ju Hwang, Chang D. Yoo

Keywords: Soft-subnetwork, Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL)

TL;DR: SoftNet jointly learns the model weights and adaptive non-binary soft masks at a base training session in which each mask consists of the major and minor subnetwork.

Abstract: Inspired by Regularized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis, which states that competitive smooth (non-binary) subnetworks exist within a dense network, we propose a few-shot class-incremental learning method referred to as Soft-SubNetworks (SoftNet). Our objective is to learn a sequence of sessions incrementally, where each session only includes a few training instances per class while preserving the knowledge of the previously learned ones. SoftNet jointly learns the model weights and adaptive non-binary soft masks at a base training session in which each mask consists of the major and minor subnetwork; the former aims to minimize catastrophic forgetting during training, and the latter aims to avoid overfitting to a few samples in each new training session. We provide comprehensive empirical validations demonstrating that our SoftNet effectively tackles the few-shot incremental learning problem by surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art baselines over benchmark datasets.

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