Are Labels Needed for Incremental Instance Learning?

In this paper, we learn to classify visual object instances, incrementally and via self-supervision (self-incremental). Our learner observes a single instance at a time, which is then discarded from the dataset. Incremental instance learning is challenging, since longer learning sessions exacerbate forgetfulness, and labeling instances is cumbersome. We overcome these challenges via three contributions: \textit{i).} We propose VINIL, a self-incremental learner that can learn object instances sequentially, \textit{ii).} We equip VINIL with self-supervision to by-pass the need for instance labelling, \textit{iii).} We compare VINIL to label-supervised variants on two large-scale benchmarks~\cite{core50,ilab20m}, and show that VINIL significantly improves accuracy while reducing forgetfulness.