ECLIPSE: Efficient Continual Learning in Panoptic Segmentation with Visual Prompt Tuning

In the field of computer vision, panoptic segmentation, which merges semantic and instance segmentation, stands as a cutting-edge task. Despite the recent significant progress in panoptic segmentation 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 (VPT), 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.