The Lie of the Average: How Class Incremental Learning Evaluation Deceives You?

Abstract

Class Incremental Learning (CIL) requires models to continuously learn new classes without forgetting previously learned ones, while maintaining stable performance across all possible class sequences. In real-world settings, the order in which classes arrive is diverse and unpredictable, and model performance can vary substantially across different sequences. Yet mainstream evaluation protocols calculate mean and variance from only a small set of randomly sampled sequences. Our theoretical analysis and empirical results demonstrate that this sampling strategy fails to capture the full performance range, resulting in biased mean estimates and a severe underestimation of the true variance in the performance distribution. We therefore contend that a robust CIL evaluation protocol should accurately characterize and estimate the entire performance distribution. To this end, we introduce the concept of extreme sequences and provide theoretical justification for their crucial role in the reliable evaluation of CIL. Moreover, we observe a consistent positive correlation between inter-task similarity and model performance, a relation that can be leveraged to guide the search for extreme sequences. Building on these insights, we propose EDGE (Extreme case-based Distribution & Generalization Evaluation), an evaluation protocol that adaptively identifies and samples extreme class sequences using inter-task similarity, offering a closer approximation of the ground-truth performance distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EDGE effectively captures performance extremes and yields more accurate estimates of distributional boundaries, providing actionable insights for model selection and robustness checking. Our code is available at https://github.com/AIGNLAI/EDGE.