# Causes of Catastrophic Forgetting in Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation Source: [Causes of Catastrophic Forgetting in Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:56:55.238Z Authors: Tobias Kalb, J\\"urgen Beyerer Published: 2022-09-16T15:48:35.000Z ## Abstract Class-incremental learning for semantic segmentation (CiSS) is presently a highly researched field which aims at updating a semantic segmentation model by sequentially learning new semantic classes. A major challenge in CiSS is overcoming the effects of catastrophic forgetting, which describes the sudden drop of accuracy on previously learned classes after the model is trained on a new set of classes. Despite latest advances in mitigating catastrophic forgetting, the underlying causes of forgetting specifically in CiSS are not well understood. Therefore, in a set of experiments and representational analyses, we demonstrate that the semantic shift of the background class and a bias towards new classes are the major causes of forgetting in CiSS. Furthermore, we show that both causes mostly manifest themselves in deeper classification layers of the network, while the early layers of the model are not affected. Finally, we demonstrate how both causes are effectively mitigated utilizing the information contained in the background, with the help of knowledge distillation and an unbiased cross-entropy loss. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()