CIP-Net: Continual Interpretable Prototype-based Network

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Di Valerio, Federico, Proietti, Michela, Ragno, Alessio, Capobianco, Roberto
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Di Valerio, Federico
Proietti, Michela
Ragno, Alessio
Capobianco, Roberto
author_facet Di Valerio, Federico
Proietti, Michela
Ragno, Alessio
Capobianco, Roberto
contents Continual learning constrains models to learn new tasks over time without forgetting what they have already learned. A key challenge in this setting is catastrophic forgetting, where learning new information causes the model to lose its performance on previous tasks. Recently, explainable AI has been proposed as a promising way to better understand and reduce forgetting. In particular, self-explainable models are useful because they generate explanations during prediction, which can help preserve knowledge. However, most existing explainable approaches use post-hoc explanations or require additional memory for each new task, resulting in limited scalability. In this work, we introduce CIP-Net, an exemplar-free self-explainable prototype-based model designed for continual learning. CIP-Net avoids storing past examples and maintains a simple architecture, while still providing useful explanations and strong performance. We demonstrate that CIPNet achieves state-of-the-art performances compared to previous exemplar-free and self-explainable methods in both task- and class-incremental settings, while bearing significantly lower memory-related overhead. This makes it a practical and interpretable solution for continual learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_07981
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CIP-Net: Continual Interpretable Prototype-based Network
Di Valerio, Federico
Proietti, Michela
Ragno, Alessio
Capobianco, Roberto
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Continual learning constrains models to learn new tasks over time without forgetting what they have already learned. A key challenge in this setting is catastrophic forgetting, where learning new information causes the model to lose its performance on previous tasks. Recently, explainable AI has been proposed as a promising way to better understand and reduce forgetting. In particular, self-explainable models are useful because they generate explanations during prediction, which can help preserve knowledge. However, most existing explainable approaches use post-hoc explanations or require additional memory for each new task, resulting in limited scalability. In this work, we introduce CIP-Net, an exemplar-free self-explainable prototype-based model designed for continual learning. CIP-Net avoids storing past examples and maintains a simple architecture, while still providing useful explanations and strong performance. We demonstrate that CIPNet achieves state-of-the-art performances compared to previous exemplar-free and self-explainable methods in both task- and class-incremental settings, while bearing significantly lower memory-related overhead. This makes it a practical and interpretable solution for continual learning.
title CIP-Net: Continual Interpretable Prototype-based Network
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07981