{"ID":2877383,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21240","arxiv_id":"2508.21240","title":"Class Incremental Continual Learning with Self-Organizing Maps and Variational Autoencoders Using Synthetic Replay","abstract":"This work introduces a novel generative continual learning framework based on self-organizing maps (SOMs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) to enable memory-efficient replay, eliminating the need to store raw data samples or task labels. For high-dimensional input spaces, such as of CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, we design a scheme where the SOM operates over the latent space learned by a VAE, whereas, for lower-dimensional inputs, such as those found in MNIST and FashionMNIST, the SOM operates in a standalone fashion. Our method stores a running mean, variance, and covariance for each SOM unit, from which synthetic samples are then generated during future learning iterations. For the VAE-based method, generated samples are then fed through the decoder to then be used in subsequent replay. Experimental results on standard class-incremental benchmarks show that our approach performs competitively with state-of-the-art memory-based methods and outperforms memory-free methods, notably improving over best state-of-the-art single class incremental performance on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 by nearly $10$\\% and $7$\\%, respectively. Our methodology further facilitates easy visualization of the learning process and can also be utilized as a generative model post-training. Results show our method's capability as a scalable, task-label-free, and memory-efficient solution for continual learning.","short_abstract":"This work introduces a novel generative continual learning framework based on self-organizing maps (SOMs) and variational autoencoders (VAEs) to enable memory-efficient replay, eliminating the need to store raw data samples or task labels. For high-dimensional input spaces, such as of CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, we design...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21240","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.21240v1","authors":"[\"Pujan Thapa\",\"Alexander Ororbia\",\"Travis Desell\"]","published":"2025-08-28T22:11:22Z","proceeding":"cs.LG","tasks":"[\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[\"Generative Adversarial Network\",\"Variational Autoencoder\"]","has_code":false}