SSAST-Adapter: A Parameter-efficient Incremental Learning Algorithm for Underwater Acoustic Target Recognition

Abstract

Underwater acoustic target recognition involves identifying and classifying targets in underwater environments using acoustic signals. In recent years, deep learning has made significant progress in this field. However, the models require the entire dataset to be available upfront, and classification categories must be predefined. In practical scenarios, new objects or species may appear in underwater environments over time, making it impractical to retrain a model from scratch each time new data is introduced. At the same time, training on new data inevitably leads to catastrophic forgetting of past data. To address these challenges, we propose a large-scale pre-training strategy combined with adapters to enable incremental learning without the need for complete retraining. To minimize the number of parameters during model fine-tuning, we employ a adapter structure at various network layers, reducing the number of trainable parameters to less than 2%. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method effectively reduces the need for full retraining by allowing the model to update in a resource-efficient manner using only new data, and the model has achieved high recognition accuracy in underwater acoustic target recognition tasks.