  Inspired by Regularized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (RLTH), which hypothesizes
that there exist smooth (non-binary) subnetworks within a dense network that
achieve the competitive performance of the dense network, we propose a few-shot
class incremental learning (FSCIL) method referred to as \emph{Soft-SubNetworks
(SoftNet)}. Our objective is to learn a sequence of sessions incrementally,
where each session only includes a few training instances per class while
preserving the knowledge of the previously learned ones. SoftNet jointly learns
the model weights and adaptive non-binary soft masks at a base training session
in which each mask consists of the major and minor subnetwork; the former aims
to minimize catastrophic forgetting during training, and the latter aims to
avoid overfitting to a few samples in each new training session. We provide
comprehensive empirical validations demonstrating that our SoftNet effectively
tackles the few-shot incremental learning problem by surpassing the performance
of state-of-the-art baselines over benchmark datasets.
