Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to solve the neural networks' catastrophic forgetting problem, which refers to the fact that once the network updates on a new task, its performance on previously-learned tasks drops dramatically. Most successful CIL methods incrementally train a feature extractor with the aid of stored exemplars, or estimate the feature distribution with the stored prototypes. However, the stored exemplars would violate the data privacy concerns, while the stored prototypes might not reasonably be consistent with a proper feature distribution, hindering the exploration of real-world CIL applications. In this paper, we propose a method of \textit{e}mbedding distillation and \textit{Ta}sk-oriented \textit{g}eneration (\textit{eTag}) for CIL, which requires neither the exemplar nor the prototype. Instead, eTag achieves a data-free manner to train the neural networks incrementally. To prevent the feature extractor from forgetting, eTag distills the embeddings of the network's intermediate blocks. Additionally, eTag enables a generative network to produce suitable features, fitting the needs of the top incremental classifier. Experimental results confirmed that our proposed eTag considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-sub\footnote{Our code is available in the Supplementary Materials.

本研究提出了一种称为 eTag 的方法，通过嵌入蒸馏和面向任务的生成，无需存储样本或原型即可增量训练神经网络，以解决 Class-Incremental Learning 中的遗忘问题，并在 CIFAR-100 和 ImageNet-sub 数据集上获得了显著优于现有方法的结果。

eTag: 基于嵌入蒸馏和任务导向生成的类增量学习