Aiming to incrementally learn new classes with only few samples while preserving the knowledge of base (old) classes, few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) faces several challenges, such as overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. Such a challenging problem is often tackled by fixing a feature extractor trained on base classes to reduce the adverse effects of overfitting and forgetting. Under such formulation, our primary focus is representation learning on base classes to tackle the unique challenge of FSCIL: simultaneously achieving the transferability and the discriminability of the learned representation. Building upon the recent efforts for enhancing transferability, such as promoting the spread of features, we find that trying to secure the spread of features within a more confined feature space enables the learned representation to strike a better balance between transferability and discriminability. Thus, in stark contrast to prior beliefs that the inter-class distance should be maximized, we claim that the closer different classes are, the better for FSCIL. The empirical results and analysis from the perspective of information bottleneck theory justify our simple yet seemingly counter-intuitive representation learning method, raising research questions and suggesting alternative research directions. The code is available at https://github.com/JungHunOh/CLOSER_ECCV2024.

本研究针对少样本类增量学习（FSCIL）中的知识保留和过拟合等问题，提出了一种新的表示学习方法。通过在更紧凑的特征空间内控制特征的扩散，研究表明，相对接近的不同类别可以更有效地实现表示的可转移性和可区分性，从而为FSCIL提供了新的视角和研究方向。 

CLOSER：朝着更好的少样本类增量学习表示学习