Controllable Relation Disentanglement for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) requires models to be updated incrementally with limited labeled samples given in each session, differing from the traditional training paradigm and easily resulting in severe spurious relations between categories. Thus, in this paper, we propose to address FSCIL from a new perspective: enhancing FSCIL via disentangling spurious relations between categories. Accordingly, we propose a simple yet effective approach, dubbed ConTrollable Relation-disentangLed Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (CTRL-FSCIL). Specifically, during a base session, we propose to anchor base class embeddings in feature space and build disentangled proxies to bridge gaps between the learning processes of categories encountered in different sessions, making category relations controllable. Furthermore, during incremental learning, the parameters of the backbone network are frozen in order to relieve the negative impact of data scarcity. Meanwhile, a relation disentanglement loss is employed to guide a relation control module to disentangle spurious relations between learned categories. In this way, spurious relation issues in FSCIL can be alleviated. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100, mini-ImageNet, and CUB-200 demonstrate the effectiveness of CTRL-FSCIL. Our code has been publicly released on github.