# How to add a new category to a deep learning model?

Say I have done transfer learning on a pre-trained network to recognize 10 objects. How do add a 11th item that the network can classify without losing all the 10 categories that I already trained nor the information from the original pre-trained model ? A friend told me that active research is going on in this field, but I can't find any relevant papers or a name by which to search for ?

Thank you.

• If you train with much more class then there is? is that can help? For example, let's say you know there will be no more than 1000 class. You train from the beginning your classifier with 1000 class on the 10 class you current have, and when you have more classes, just kept the train on them... Is that can be a good solution? Is there paper regarding this approach? – Michael Jan 9 '18 at 12:48

If this is just a one-time case, you can simply re-train the neural network. If you frequently have to add new classes, then this is a bad idea. What you want to do in such cases is called content-based image retrieval (CBIR), or simply image retrieval or visual search. I will explain both cases in my answer below.

## One-time case

If this just happens once - you forgot the 11th class, or your customer changed his/her mind - but it won't happen again, then then you can simply an 11th output node to the last layer. Initialize the weights to this node randomly, but use the weights you already have for the other outputs. Then, just train it as usual. It might be helpful to fix some weights, i.e. don't train these.

An extreme case would be to only train the new weights, and leave all others fixed. But I am not sure whether this will work that well - might be worth a try.

## Content-based image retrieval

Consider the following example: you are working for a CD store, who wants their customers to be able to take a picture of an album cover, and the application shows them the CD they scanned in their online store. In that case, you would have to re-train the network for every new CD they have in the store. That might be 5 new CDs each day, so re-training the network that way is not suitable.

The solution is to train a network, which maps the image into a feature space. Each image will be represented by a descriptor, which is e.g. a 256-dimensional vector. You can "classify" an image by calculating this descriptor, and comparing it to your database of descriptors (i.e. the descriptors of all CDs you have in your store). The closest descriptor in the database wins.

How do you train a neural network to learn such a descriptor vector? That is an active field of research. You can find recent work by searching for keywords like "image retrieval" or "metric learning".

Right now, people usually take a pre-trained network, e.g. VGG-16, cut off the FC layers, and use the final convolutional as your descriptor vector. You can further train this network e.g. by using a siamese network with triplet loss.

• I have been looking into one-shot learning. Do you think that can help me ? – nnrales Dec 10 '16 at 20:21
• I don't really know about one-shot learning. But the one-shot deep learning papers I found look quite similar to the CBIR approach, so it could definitely be useful for you – hbaderts Dec 10 '16 at 20:42
Your network topology might look different, but in the very end, your pre-trained network has a layer, which handles the recognition of 10 original classes. The easiest (and working) trick to introduce the 11th, 12th.. nth class, is to use all the layers before the last as granted and add an additional layer (in a new model, or as a parallel one) that will also sit on top of all but last layers, will be looking alike to the 10class layer (which is most probably matmul of dense layer and a matrix of shape [len(dense layer), 10] with optional bias).
Your new layer would be a matmul layer with shape [len(dense layer), len(new classes)].