Uniform Herding: Exemplar Replay with Representation Refresh

arXiv:2608.13061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As the feature representation changes, replay must preserve the earlier classes. However, only a bounded active exemplar set can be replayed. We propose Uniform Herding, which allocates the current active set across observed classes and uses a bounded candidate pool to refresh their chosen exemplars in the current representation. On CIFAR-100 with ten class-incremental tasks, a ResNet-18 backbone, active budget M=2{,}000, retrieval budget b=64, and three seeds, Uniform Herding obtains 44.00pm0.51% final average accuracy and 17.22pm0.43% forgetting, compared with 42.33pm1.20% and 24.87pm1.11% for iCaRL. Within the Uniform Herding protocol, final accuracy decreased when NME or herding was replaced with the tested alternatives, while forgetting increased when distillation was removed. Changing the retrieval budget has a smaller effect across the tested range than changing the active budget. The comparison with iCaRL is end-to-end. It does not isolate the effect of refresh from the other protocol differences. These results are limited to the tested protocol.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-08-14