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DATS: Distance-Aware Temperature Scaling for Calibrated Class-Incremental Learning

Machine Learning 2025-09-26 v1

Abstract

Continual Learning (CL) is recently gaining increasing attention for its ability to enable a single model to learn incrementally from a sequence of new classes. In this scenario, it is important to keep consistent predictive performance across all the classes and prevent the so-called Catastrophic Forgetting (CF). However, in safety-critical applications, predictive performance alone is insufficient. Predictive models should also be able to reliably communicate their uncertainty in a calibrated manner - that is, with confidence scores aligned to the true frequencies of target events. Existing approaches in CL address calibration primarily from a data-centric perspective, relying on a single temperature shared across all tasks. Such solutions overlook task-specific differences, leading to large fluctuations in calibration error across tasks. For this reason, we argue that a more principled approach should adapt the temperature according to the distance to the current task. However, the unavailability of the task information at test time/during deployment poses a major challenge to achieve the intended objective. For this, we propose Distance-Aware Temperature Scaling (DATS), which combines prototype-based distance estimation with distance-aware calibration to infer task proximity and assign adaptive temperatures without prior task information. Through extensive empirical evaluation on both standard benchmarks and real-world, imbalanced datasets taken from the biomedical domain, our approach demonstrates to be stable, reliable and consistent in reducing calibration error across tasks compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.21161,
  title  = {DATS: Distance-Aware Temperature Scaling for Calibrated Class-Incremental Learning},
  author = {Giuseppe Serra and Florian Buettner},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21161},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:56:11.345Z