Experience Replay and Zero-Shot Clustering for Continual Learning in Diabetic Retinopathy Detection

Gusseppe Bravo-Rocca, Peini Liu, Jordi Guitart, Jordi Guitart, Ajay Dholakia, David Ellison, Rodrigo M. Carrillo-Larco

2025

Abstract

We present an approach to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in Continual Learning (CL), focusing on domain incremental scenarios in medical imaging. Our method leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate task-agnostic descriptions from multimodal inputs, enabling zero-shot clustering of tasks without supervision. This clustering underpins an enhanced Experience Replay (ER) strategy, strategically sampling data points to refresh the model’s memory while preserving privacy. By incrementally updating a multi-head classifier using only data embeddings, our approach maintains both efficiency and data confidentiality. Evaluated on a challenging diabetic retinopathy dataset, our method demonstrates significant improvements over traditional CL techniques, including Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), Gradient Episodic Memory (GEM), and Learning Without Forgetting (LWF). Extensive experiments across Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Residual, and Attention architectures show consistent performance gains (up to 3.1% in Average Mean Class Accuracy) and reduced forgetting, with only 6% computational overhead. These results highlight our approach’s potential for privacy-preserving, efficient CL in sensitive domains like healthcare, offering a promising direction for developing adaptive AI systems that can learn continuously while respecting data privacy constraints.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Bravo-Rocca G., Liu P., Guitart J., Dholakia A., Ellison D. and Carrillo-Larco R. (2025). Experience Replay and Zero-Shot Clustering for Continual Learning in Diabetic Retinopathy Detection. In Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-728-3, SciTePress, pages 81-92. DOI: 10.5220/0013128600003912

in Bibtex Style

@conference{visapp25,
author={Gusseppe Bravo-Rocca and Peini Liu and Jordi Guitart and Ajay Dholakia and David Ellison and Rodrigo Carrillo-Larco},
title={Experience Replay and Zero-Shot Clustering for Continual Learning in Diabetic Retinopathy Detection},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP},
year={2025},
pages={81-92},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0013128600003912},
isbn={978-989-758-728-3},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 20th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications - Volume 2: VISAPP
TI - Experience Replay and Zero-Shot Clustering for Continual Learning in Diabetic Retinopathy Detection
SN - 978-989-758-728-3
AU - Bravo-Rocca G.
AU - Liu P.
AU - Guitart J.
AU - Dholakia A.
AU - Ellison D.
AU - Carrillo-Larco R.
PY - 2025
SP - 81
EP - 92
DO - 10.5220/0013128600003912
PB - SciTePress