Mitigate forgetting in few-shot class-incremental learning using different image views

In the few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) setting, new classes with few training examples become available incrementally, and deep learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting of the previous classes when trained on new classes. Data augmentation techniques are generally used to increase the training data and improve the model performance. In this work, we demonstrate that differently augmented views of the same image obtained by applying data augmentations may not necessarily activate the same set of neurons in the model. Therefore, the information gained by a model regarding a class, when trained using data augmentation, may not necessarily be stored in the same set of neurons in the model. Consequently, during incremental training, even if some of the model weights that store the previously seen class information for a particular view get overwritten, the information of the previous classes for the other views may still remain intact in the other model weights. Therefore, the impact of catastrophic forgetting on the model predictions is different for different data augmentations used during training. Based on this, we present an Augmentation-based Prediction Rectification (APR) approach to reduce the impact of catastrophic forgetting in the FSCIL setting. APR can also augment other FSCIL approaches and significantly improve their performance. We also propose a novel feature synthesis module (FSM) for synthesizing features relevant to the previously seen classes without requiring training data from these classes. FSM outperforms other generative approaches in this setting. We experimentally show that our approach outperforms other methods on benchmark datasets.