FineFMPL: Fine-grained Feature Mining Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

FineFMPL: Fine-grained Feature Mining Prompt Learning for Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning

Hongbo Sun, Jiahuan Zhou, Xiangteng He, Jinglin Xu, Yuxin Peng

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 1299-1307. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/144

Few-Shot Class Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims to continually learn new classes with few training samples without forgetting already learned old classes. Existing FSCIL methods generally fix the backbone network in incremental sessions to achieve a balance between suppressing forgetting old classes and learning new classes. However, the fixed backbone network causes insufficient learning of new classes from a few samples. Benefiting from the powerful visual and textual understanding ability of Vision-Language (VL) pre-training models, we propose a Fine-grained Feature Mining Prompt Learning (FineFMPL) approach to adapt the VL model to FSCIL, which comprehensively learns and memorizes fine-grained discriminative information of emerging classes. Concretely, the visual probe prompt is firstly proposed to guide the image encoder of VL model to extract global-level coarse-grained features and object-level fine-grained features, and visual prototypes are preserved based on image patch significance, which contains the discriminative characteristics exclusive to the class. Secondly, the textual context prompt is constructed by cross-modal mapping of visual prototypes, feeding into the text encoder of VL model to memorize the class information as textual prototypes. Finally, integrating visual and textual prototypes based on fine-grained feature mining into the model improves the recognition performance of all classes in FSCIL. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our FineFMPL achieves new state-of-the-art. The code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/FineFMPL_IJCAI2024.
Keywords:
Computer Vision: CV: Recognition (object detection, categorization)