  Large deep learning models are impressive, but they struggle when real-time
data is not available. Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) poses a
significant challenge for deep neural networks to learn new tasks from just a
few labeled samples without forgetting the previously learned ones. This setup
easily leads to catastrophic forgetting and overfitting problems, severely
affecting model performance. Studying FSCIL helps overcome deep learning model
limitations on data volume and acquisition time, while improving practicality
and adaptability of machine learning models. This paper provides a
comprehensive survey on FSCIL. Unlike previous surveys, we aim to synthesize
few-shot learning and incremental learning, focusing on introducing FSCIL from
two perspectives, while reviewing over 30 theoretical research studies and more
than 20 applied research studies. From the theoretical perspective, we provide
a novel categorization approach that divides the field into five subcategories,
including traditional machine learning methods, meta-learning based methods,
feature and feature space-based methods, replay-based methods, and dynamic
network structure-based methods. We also evaluate the performance of recent
theoretical research on benchmark datasets of FSCIL. From the application
perspective, FSCIL has achieved impressive achievements in various fields of
computer vision such as image classification, object detection, and image
segmentation, as well as in natural language processing and graph. We summarize
the important applications. Finally, we point out potential future research
directions, including applications, problem setups, and theory development.
Overall, this paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the latest advances in
FSCIL from a methodological, performance, and application perspective.
