{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T03:03:28Z","timestamp":1773803008163,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":0,"publisher":"Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)","issue":"25","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AAAI"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Continual learning constrains models to learn new tasks over time without forgetting what they have already learned. A key challenge in this setting is catastrophic forgetting, where learning new information causes the model to lose its performance on previous tasks. Recently, explainable AI has been proposed as a promising way to better understand and reduce forgetting. In particular, self-explainable models are useful because they generate explanations during prediction, which can help preserve knowledge. However, most existing explainable approaches use post-hoc explanations or require additional memory for each new task, resulting in limited scalability. In this work, we introduce CIP-Net, an exemplar-free self-explainable prototype-based model designed for continual learning. CIP-Net avoids storing past examples and maintains a simple architecture, while still providing useful explanations and strong performance. We demonstrate that CIP-Net achieves state-of-the-art performances compared to previous exemplar-free and self-explainable methods in both task- and class-incremental settings, while bearing significantly lower memory-related overhead. This makes it a practical and interpretable solution for continual learning.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1609\/aaai.v40i25.39216","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T01:17:41Z","timestamp":1773796661000},"page":"20772-20780","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["CIP-Net: Continual Interpretable Prototype-based Network"],"prefix":"10.1609","volume":"40","author":[{"given":"Federico","family":"Di Valerio","sequence":"first","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Michela","family":"Proietti","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Alessio","family":"Ragno","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]},{"given":"Roberto","family":"Capobianco","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[]}],"member":"9382","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"container-title":["Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/39216\/43177","content-type":"application\/pdf","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"text-mining"},{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/download\/39216\/43177","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,18]],"date-time":"2026-03-18T01:17:41Z","timestamp":1773796661000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/ojs.aaai.org\/index.php\/AAAI\/article\/view\/39216"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]},"references-count":0,"journal-issue":{"issue":"25","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,17]]}},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1609\/aaai.v40i25.39216","relation":{},"ISSN":["2374-3468","2159-5399"],"issn-type":[{"value":"2374-3468","type":"electronic"},{"value":"2159-5399","type":"print"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,14]]}}}