Constructing Sample-to-Class Graph for Few-Shot Class-Incremental
  Learning
Fuyuan Hu Jian Zhang Fan Lyu Linyan Li Fenglei Xu
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to build machine learning
model that can continually learn new concepts from a few data samples, without
forgetting knowledge of old classes.
  The challenges of FSCIL lies in the limited data of new classes, which not
only lead to significant overfitting issues but also exacerbates the notorious
catastrophic forgetting problems. As proved in early studies, building sample
relationships is beneficial for learning from few-shot samples. In this paper,
we promote the idea to the incremental scenario, and propose a Sample-to-Class
(S2C) graph learning method for FSCIL.
  Specifically, we propose a Sample-level Graph Network (SGN) that focuses on
analyzing sample relationships within a single session. This network helps
aggregate similar samples, ultimately leading to the extraction of more refined
class-level features.
  Then, we present a Class-level Graph Network (CGN) that establishes
connections across class-level features of both new and old classes. This
network plays a crucial role in linking the knowledge between different
sessions and helps improve overall learning in the FSCIL scenario. Moreover, we
design a multi-stage strategy for training S2C model, which mitigates the
training challenges posed by limited data in the incremental process.
  The multi-stage training strategy is designed to build S2C graph from base to
few-shot stages, and improve the capacity via an extra pseudo-incremental
stage. Experiments on three popular benchmark datasets show that our method
clearly outperforms the baselines and sets new state-of-the-art results in
FSCIL.