Exemplar-Free Analytic Learning for Multi-Label Audio Class-Incremental Learning

Abstract: Audio classification is inherently a multi-label task, as real-world acoustic environments contain multiple simultaneous sound events. When new sound classes emerge, models must incorporate them without forgetting previously learned ones: a challenge known as class-incremental learning. Existing methods rely on storing past data and iterative gradient updates, which struggle under incomplete multi-label supervision because only the newly introduced classes are annotated at each phase, leaving old-class labels unavailable. We investigate exemplar-free analytic continual learning as a principled alternative, in which a linear classifier is updated in closed form without storing historical recordings or performing incremental back-propagation, and previously learned weights remain intact by construction. Building on analytic learning, we further propose ALMA, which addresses incomplete supervision and class imbalance through continuous old-class score estimates and frequency-based sample weighting. Experiments on a 50-class AudioSet-R benchmark across three incremental setups show that the analytic learner substantially outperforms gradient-based methods, and previously learned classes retain nearly unchanged detection performance as new classes are added. This study shows that ALMA is a simple yet effective solution to multi-label audio class-incremental learning.