C3Box: A CLIP-based Class-Incremental Learning Toolbox

TL;DR

C3Box is a modular Python toolbox that unifies various CLIP-based class-incremental learning methods, facilitating reproducible experiments and benchmarking in continual learning research.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, standardized framework for CLIP-based CIL, integrating multiple methods into a user-friendly, reproducible platform.

Findings

Provides a unified, modular framework for CLIP-based CIL methods.

Enables reproducible experiments with low engineering overhead.

Supports benchmarking and fair comparison of CIL approaches.

Abstract

Traditional machine learning systems are typically designed for static data distributions, which suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning from evolving data streams. Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) addresses this challenge by enabling learning systems to continuously learn new classes while preserving prior knowledge. With the rise of pre-trained models (PTMs) such as CLIP, leveraging their strong generalization and semantic alignment capabilities has become a promising direction in CIL. However, existing CLIP-based CIL methods are often scattered across disparate codebases, rely on inconsistent configurations, hindering fair comparisons, reproducibility, and practical adoption. Therefore, we propose C3Box (CLIP-based Class-inCremental learning toolBOX), a modular and comprehensive Python toolbox. C3Box integrates representative traditional CIL methods, ViT-based CIL methods, and state-of-the-art CLIP-based CIL methods into a unified CLIP-based framework. By inheriting the streamlined design of PyCIL, C3Box provides a JSON-based configuration and standardized execution pipeline. This design enables reproducible experimentation with low engineering overhead and makes C3Box a reliable benchmark platform for continual learning research. Designed to be user-friendly, C3Box relies only on widely used open-source libraries and supports major operating systems. The code is available at https://github.com/LAMDA-CL/C3Box.