Sun Wenju, Li Qingyong, Zhang Jing, Wang Danyu, Wang Wen, Geng Yangli’ao
[Objective] This study comprehensively reviews the advancements in deep incremental learning techniques from the perspective of addressing catastrophic forgetting, aiming to provide references for the research community. [Coverage] Utilizing search terms such as “Incremental Learning”, “Continual Learning”, and “Catastrophic Forgetting”, we retrieved literature from the Web of Science, Google Scholar, DBLP, and CKNI. By reading and organizing the retrieved literature, a total of 105 representative publications were selected. [Methods] The paper begins by defining incremental learning and outlining its problem formulation and inherent challenges. Subsequently, we categorize incremental learning methods into regularization-based, memory-based, and dynamic architecture-based approaches, and review their theoretical underpinnings, advantages and disadvantages in detail. [Results] We evaluated some classical and recent methods in a unified experimental setting. The experimental results demonstrate that regularization-based methods are efficient in application but cannot fully avoid forgetting; memory-based methods are significantly affected by the number of retained exemplars; and dynamic architecture-based methods effectively prevent forgetting but incur additional computational costs. [Limitations] The scope of this review is limited to deep learning approaches, excluding traditional machine learning techniques. [Conclusions] Under optimal conditions, memory-based and dynamic architecture-based strategies tend to outperform regularization-based approaches. However, the increased complexity of these methods may hinder their practical application. Furthermore, current incremental learning methods show suboptimal performance compared to joint training models, marking a critical direction for future research.