Activating Sparse Part Concepts for 3D Class Incremental Learning

This work tackles the challenge of 3D Class-Incremental Learning (CIL), where a model must learn to classify new 3D objects while retaining knowledge of previously learned classes. Existing methods often struggle with catastrophic forgetting, misclassifying old objects due to overreliance on shortcut local features. Our approach addresses this issue by learning a set of part concepts for part-aware features. Particularly, we only activate a small subset of part concepts for the feature representation of each part-aware feature. This facilitates better generalization across categories and mitigates catastrophic forgetting. We further improve the task-wise classification through a part relation-aware Transformer design. At last, we devise learnable affinities to fuse task-wise classification heads and avoid confusion among different tasks. We evaluate our method on three 3D CIL benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at https://github.com/zhenyatian/ILPC.