Incremental Learning with Repetition via Pseudo-Feature Projection (2502.19922v1)

Abstract: Incremental Learning scenarios do not always represent real-world inference use-cases, which tend to have less strict task boundaries, and exhibit repetition of common classes and concepts in their continual data stream. To better represent these use-cases, new scenarios with partial repetition and mixing of tasks are proposed, where the repetition patterns are innate to the scenario and unknown to the strategy. We investigate how exemplar-free incremental learning strategies are affected by data repetition, and we adapt a series of state-of-the-art approaches to analyse and fairly compare them under both settings. Further, we also propose a novel method (Horde), able to dynamically adjust an ensemble of self-reliant feature extractors, and align them by exploiting class repetition. Our proposed exemplar-free method achieves competitive results in the classic scenario without repetition, and state-of-the-art performance in the one with repetition.