Class Incremental Continual Learning with Self-Organizing Maps and Variational Autoencoders Using Synthetic Replay
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arXiv
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| Autori principali: | , , |
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| Natura: | Preprint |
| Pubblicazione: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866911129618350080 |
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| author | Thapa, Pujan Ororbia, Alexander Desell, Travis |
| author_facet | Thapa, Pujan Ororbia, Alexander Desell, Travis |
| contents | This work introduces a novel generative continual learning framework based on self-organizing maps (SOMs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) to enable memory-efficient replay, eliminating the need to store raw data samples or task labels. For high-dimensional input spaces, such as of CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, we design a scheme where the SOM operates over the latent space learned by a VAE, whereas, for lower-dimensional inputs, such as those found in MNIST and FashionMNIST, the SOM operates in a standalone fashion. Our method stores a running mean, variance, and covariance for each SOM unit, from which synthetic samples are then generated during future learning iterations. For the VAE-based method, generated samples are then fed through the decoder to then be used in subsequent replay. Experimental results on standard class-incremental benchmarks show that our approach performs competitively with state-of-the-art memory-based methods and outperforms memory-free methods, notably improving over best state-of-the-art single class incremental performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 by nearly $10$\% and $7$\%, respectively. Our methodology further facilitates easy visualization of the learning process and can also be utilized as a generative model post-training. Results show our method's capability as a scalable, task-label-free, and memory-efficient solution for continual learning. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_21240 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Class Incremental Continual Learning with Self-Organizing Maps and Variational Autoencoders Using Synthetic Replay Thapa, Pujan Ororbia, Alexander Desell, Travis Machine Learning This work introduces a novel generative continual learning framework based on self-organizing maps (SOMs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) to enable memory-efficient replay, eliminating the need to store raw data samples or task labels. For high-dimensional input spaces, such as of CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, we design a scheme where the SOM operates over the latent space learned by a VAE, whereas, for lower-dimensional inputs, such as those found in MNIST and FashionMNIST, the SOM operates in a standalone fashion. Our method stores a running mean, variance, and covariance for each SOM unit, from which synthetic samples are then generated during future learning iterations. For the VAE-based method, generated samples are then fed through the decoder to then be used in subsequent replay. Experimental results on standard class-incremental benchmarks show that our approach performs competitively with state-of-the-art memory-based methods and outperforms memory-free methods, notably improving over best state-of-the-art single class incremental performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 by nearly $10$\% and $7$\%, respectively. Our methodology further facilitates easy visualization of the learning process and can also be utilized as a generative model post-training. Results show our method's capability as a scalable, task-label-free, and memory-efficient solution for continual learning. |
| title | Class Incremental Continual Learning with Self-Organizing Maps and Variational Autoencoders Using Synthetic Replay |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21240 |