Buffer-free Class-Incremental Learning with Out-of-Distribution Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Gupta, Srishti, Angioni, Daniele, Pintor, Maura, Demontis, Ambra, Schönherr, Lea, Biggio, Battista, Roli, Fabio
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Gupta, Srishti
Angioni, Daniele
Pintor, Maura
Demontis, Ambra
Schönherr, Lea
Biggio, Battista
Roli, Fabio
author_facet Gupta, Srishti
Angioni, Daniele
Pintor, Maura
Demontis, Ambra
Schönherr, Lea
Biggio, Battista
Roli, Fabio
contents Class-incremental learning (CIL) poses significant challenges in open-world scenarios, where models must not only learn new classes over time without forgetting previous ones but also handle inputs from unknown classes that a closed-set model would misclassify. Recent works address both issues by (i)~training multi-head models using the task-incremental learning framework, and (ii) predicting the task identity employing out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors. While effective, the latter mainly relies on joint training with a memory buffer of past data, raising concerns around privacy, scalability, and increased training time. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of post-hoc OOD detection methods and investigate their potential to eliminate the need for a memory buffer. We uncover that these methods, when applied appropriately at inference time, can serve as a strong substitute for buffer-based OOD detection. We show that this buffer-free approach achieves comparable or superior performance to buffer-based methods both in terms of class-incremental learning and the rejection of unknown samples. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets support our findings, offering new insights into the design of efficient and privacy-preserving CIL systems for open-world settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23412
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Buffer-free Class-Incremental Learning with Out-of-Distribution Detection
Gupta, Srishti
Angioni, Daniele
Pintor, Maura
Demontis, Ambra
Schönherr, Lea
Biggio, Battista
Roli, Fabio
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Class-incremental learning (CIL) poses significant challenges in open-world scenarios, where models must not only learn new classes over time without forgetting previous ones but also handle inputs from unknown classes that a closed-set model would misclassify. Recent works address both issues by (i)~training multi-head models using the task-incremental learning framework, and (ii) predicting the task identity employing out-of-distribution (OOD) detectors. While effective, the latter mainly relies on joint training with a memory buffer of past data, raising concerns around privacy, scalability, and increased training time. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of post-hoc OOD detection methods and investigate their potential to eliminate the need for a memory buffer. We uncover that these methods, when applied appropriately at inference time, can serve as a strong substitute for buffer-based OOD detection. We show that this buffer-free approach achieves comparable or superior performance to buffer-based methods both in terms of class-incremental learning and the rejection of unknown samples. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet datasets support our findings, offering new insights into the design of efficient and privacy-preserving CIL systems for open-world settings.
title Buffer-free Class-Incremental Learning with Out-of-Distribution Detection
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23412