English

ProtoFlow: Mitigating Forgetting in Class-Incremental Remote Sensing Segmentation via Low-Curvature Prototype Flow

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-19 v2

Abstract

Remote sensing segmentation in real deployment is inherently continual: new semantic categories emerge, and acquisition conditions shift across seasons, cities, and sensors. Despite recent progress, many incremental approaches still treat training steps as isolated updates, which leaves representation drift and forgetting insufficiently controlled. We present ProtoFlow, a time-aware prototype dynamics framework that models class prototypes as trajectories and learns their evolution with an explicit temporal vector field. By jointly enforcing low-curvature motion and inter-class separation, ProtoFlow stabilizes prototype geometry throughout incremental learning. Experiments on standard class- and domain-incremental remote sensing benchmarks show consistent gains over strong baselines, including up to 1.5-2.0 points improvement in mIoUall, together with reduced forgetting. These results suggest that explicitly modeling temporal prototype evolution is a practical and interpretable strategy for robust continual remote sensing segmentation. Open-source code:https://github.com/dudududke/protoflow.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.03212,
  title  = {ProtoFlow: Mitigating Forgetting in Class-Incremental Remote Sensing Segmentation via Low-Curvature Prototype Flow},
  author = {Jiekai Wu and Rong Fu and Chuangqi Li and Zijian Zhang and Guangxin Wu and Hao Zhang and Shiyin Lin and Jianyuan Ni and Yang Li and Dongxu Zhang and Amir H. Gandomi and Simon Fong and Pengbin Feng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.03212},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:53:08.076Z