Long-Tail Class Incremental Learning via Independent Sub-prototype Construction

Long-tail class incremental learning (LT-CIL) is designed to perpetually acquire novel knowledge from an imbalanced and perpetually evolving data stream while ensuring the retention of previously acquired knowledge. The existing method only re-balances data distribution and ignores exploring the potential relationship between different samples, causing non-robust representations and even severe forgetting in classes with few samples. In this paper, we constructed two parallel spaces simultaneously: 1) Sub-prototype space and 2) Reminiscence space to learn robust representations while alleviating forgetfulness. Concretely, we advance the concept of the sub-prototype space, which amalgamates insights from diverse classes. This integration facilitates the mutual complementarity of varied knowledge, thereby augmenting the attainment of more robust representations.Furthermore, we introduce the reminiscence space, which encapsulates each class distribution, aiming to constraint model optimization and mitigate the phenomenon of forgetting. The tandem utilization of the two parallel spaces effectively alleviates the adverse consequences associated with imbalanced data distribution, preventing forgetting without needing replay examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks.