A Multihead Continual Learning Framework for Fine-Grained Fashion Image Retrieval with Contrastive Learning and Exponential Moving Average Distillation

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Autori principali: Xiao, Ling, Yamasaki, Toshihiko
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Xiao, Ling
Yamasaki, Toshihiko
author_facet Xiao, Ling
Yamasaki, Toshihiko
contents Most fine-grained fashion image retrieval (FIR) methods assume a static setting, requiring full retraining when new attributes appear, which is costly and impractical for dynamic scenarios. Although pretrained models support zero-shot inference, their accuracy drops without supervision, and no prior work explores class-incremental learning (CIL) for fine-grained FIR. We propose a multihead continual learning framework for fine-grained fashion image retrieval with contrastive learning and exponential moving average (EMA) distillation (MCL-FIR). MCL-FIR adopts a multi-head design to accommodate evolving classes across increments, reformulates triplet inputs into doublets with InfoNCE for simpler and more effective training, and employs EMA distillation for efficient knowledge transfer. Experiments across four datasets demonstrate that, beyond its scalability, MCL-FIR achieves a strong balance between efficiency and accuracy. It significantly outperforms CIL baselines under similar training cost, and compared with static methods, it delivers comparable performance while using only about 30% of the training cost. The source code is publicly available in https://github.com/Dr-LingXiao/MCL-FIR.
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Multihead Continual Learning Framework for Fine-Grained Fashion Image Retrieval with Contrastive Learning and Exponential Moving Average Distillation
Xiao, Ling
Yamasaki, Toshihiko
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Most fine-grained fashion image retrieval (FIR) methods assume a static setting, requiring full retraining when new attributes appear, which is costly and impractical for dynamic scenarios. Although pretrained models support zero-shot inference, their accuracy drops without supervision, and no prior work explores class-incremental learning (CIL) for fine-grained FIR. We propose a multihead continual learning framework for fine-grained fashion image retrieval with contrastive learning and exponential moving average (EMA) distillation (MCL-FIR). MCL-FIR adopts a multi-head design to accommodate evolving classes across increments, reformulates triplet inputs into doublets with InfoNCE for simpler and more effective training, and employs EMA distillation for efficient knowledge transfer. Experiments across four datasets demonstrate that, beyond its scalability, MCL-FIR achieves a strong balance between efficiency and accuracy. It significantly outperforms CIL baselines under similar training cost, and compared with static methods, it delivers comparable performance while using only about 30% of the training cost. The source code is publicly available in https://github.com/Dr-LingXiao/MCL-FIR.
title A Multihead Continual Learning Framework for Fine-Grained Fashion Image Retrieval with Contrastive Learning and Exponential Moving Average Distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20648