Two-Way Is Better Than One: Bidirectional Alignment with Cycle Consistency for Exemplar-Free Class-Incremental Learning
Continual learning (CL) seeks models that acquire new skills without erasing prior knowledge. In exemplar-free class-incremental learning (EFCIL), this challenge is amplified because past data cannot be stored, making representation drift for old classes particularly harmful. Prototype-based EFCIL is attractive for its efficiency, yet prototypes drift as the embedding space evolves; therefore, projection-based drift compensation has become a popular remedy. We show, however, that existing one-directional projections introduce systematic bias: they either retroactively distort the current feature geometry or align past classes only locally, leaving cycle inconsistencies that accumulate acr...
| Authors | Hongye Xu, Bartosz Krawczyk |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.