Few-Shot Class-Incremental Audio Classification Using Pseudo-Incrementally Trained Embedding Learner and Continually Updated Stochastic Classifier

Few-shot Class-incremental Audio Classification (FCAC) aims to progressively recognize incremental classes with few tagged samples and meanwhile memorize base classes. To achieve satisfactory FCAC performance, the model needs to have high stability (memorizing base classes) and strong plasticity (adapting to incremental classes). In this work, we design a model which can be decoupled into two independent modules, namely an embedding learner and a stochastic classifier. The former is the backbone of a residual convolutional network, while the latter is composed of distributions and each distribution consists of a mean vector and a variance vector for representing one class. After being trained in the base session, the embedding learner is not updated in each incremental session and thus can memorize the knowledge of base classes. To make the embedding learner possess strong representation ability for incremental classes, we propose a strategy to pseudo-incrementally train the embedding learner using data augmentation in the base session. On the other hand, the stochastic classifier is continually updated in each incremental session and thus can adapt to incremental classes. Our model which consists of a pseudo-incrementally trained embedding learner and a continually updated stochastic classifier can increasingly identify incremental classes without forgetting base classes. Three datasets (FSC-89, NSynth-100 and LS-100) are used to verify the effectiveness of our method. Experiments show that our method exceeds the comparison methods in accuracy, and has lower complexity than most of the comparison methods. The code is at https://github.com/vinceasvp/PITEL-CUSC.