Consistency-Guided Asynchronous Contrastive Tuning for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Tuning of Foundation Models

TL;DR

CoACT is a novel method for continual few-shot learning of foundation models, combining asynchronous contrastive tuning, controlled fine-tuning, and regularization to improve learning efficiency and reduce forgetting.

Contribution

The paper introduces CoACT, a new approach that enables continual tuning of foundation models with few samples, without requiring extensive initial training.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods by up to 12.51% in FSCIT

Reduces forgetting and improves robustness in low-shot scenarios

Effective across 16 diverse datasets

Abstract

We propose Consistency-guided Asynchronous Contrastive Tuning (CoACT), a novel method for continuously tuning foundation models to learn new classes in few-shot settings. CoACT consists of three key components:(i) asynchronous contrastive tuning, which learns new classes by including LoRA modules in the pre-trained encoder while enforcing consistency between two asynchronous encoders; (ii) controlled fine-tuning, which facilitates effective tuning of a subset of the foundation model; and (iii) consistency-guided incremental tuning, which enforces additional regularization during later sessions to reduce forgetting of the learned classes. We evaluate our proposed solution on Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) as well as a new and more challenging setup called Few-Shot Class-Incremental Tuning (FSCIT), which facilitates the continual tuning of vision foundation models to learn new classes with only a few samples per class. Unlike traditional FSCIL, FSCIT does not require a large in-distribution base session for initial fully supervised training prior to the incremental few-shot sessions. We conduct extensive evaluations across 16 diverse datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of CoACT in both FSCIL and FSCIT setups. CoACT outperforms existing methods by up to 5.02% in FSCIL and up to 12.51% in FSCIT for individual datasets, with an average improvement of 2.47%. Furthermore, CoACT exhibits reduced forgetting and enhanced robustness in low-shot experiments. Detailed ablation and sensitivity studies highlight the contribution of each component of CoACT. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/ShuvenduRoy/CoACT-FSCIL.