ECLIPSE: Efficient Continual Learning in Panoptic Segmentation with Visual Prompt Tuning
Authors: Beomyoung Kim, Joonsang Yu, Sung Ju Hwang

Panoptic segmentation combining semantic and instance segmentation stands as a cutting-edge computer vision task. Despite recent progress with deep learning models the dynamic nature of real-world applications necessitates continual learning where models adapt to new classes (plasticity) over time without forgetting old ones (catastrophic forgetting). Current continual segmentation methods often rely on distillation strategies like knowledge distillation and pseudo-labeling which are effective but result in increased training complexity and computational overhead. In this paper we introduce a novel and efficient method for continual panoptic segmentation based on Visual Prompt Tuning dubbed ECLIPSE. Our approach involves freezing the base model parameters and fine-tuning only a small set of prompt embeddings addressing both catastrophic forgetting and plasticity and significantly reducing the trainable parameters. To mitigate inherent challenges such as error propagation and semantic drift in continual segmentation we propose logit manipulation to effectively leverage common knowledge across the classes. Experiments on ADE20K continual panoptic segmentation benchmark demonstrate the superiority of ECLIPSE notably its robustness against catastrophic forgetting and its reasonable plasticity achieving a new state-of-the-art. The code is available at https://github.com/clovaai/ECLIPSE.