CIP-Net: Continual Interpretable Prototype-based Network

TL;DR

CIP-Net is a novel exemplar-free, self-explainable prototype-based model that addresses catastrophic forgetting in continual learning, offering high performance, interpretability, and low memory overhead.

Contribution

It introduces CIP-Net, a scalable, self-explainable prototype-based approach that eliminates the need for storing past examples in continual learning.

Findings

Achieves state-of-the-art results in task- and class-incremental learning.

Maintains high interpretability with explanations during prediction.

Reduces memory overhead compared to existing methods.

Abstract

Continual learning constrains models to learn new tasks over time without forgetting what they have already learned. A key challenge in this setting is catastrophic forgetting, where learning new information causes the model to lose its performance on previous tasks. Recently, explainable AI has been proposed as a promising way to better understand and reduce forgetting. In particular, self-explainable models are useful because they generate explanations during prediction, which can help preserve knowledge. However, most existing explainable approaches use post-hoc explanations or require additional memory for each new task, resulting in limited scalability. In this work, we introduce CIP-Net, an exemplar-free self-explainable prototype-based model designed for continual learning. CIP-Net avoids storing past examples and maintains a simple architecture, while still providing useful explanations and strong performance. We demonstrate that CIPNet achieves state-of-the-art performances compared to previous exemplar-free and self-explainable methods in both task- and class-incremental settings, while bearing significantly lower memory-related overhead. This makes it a practical and interpretable solution for continual learning.