cs.CVAug 11, 2026

BPG: Balancing Plasticity and Generalization for Domain Incremental Learning

Authors: Qiang WangSonglin DongShaokun WangJizhou HanXiang SongChenhao DingYuhang HeYihong Gong

Abstract

Deep neural networks excel in various tasks but struggle to generalize across evolving data distributions, leading to significant performance degradation under domain shifts. Domain incremental learning (DIL) addresses this challenge by enabling models to continuously adapt while retaining prior knowledge. Among existing DIL approaches, the parameter-isolation paradigm achieves state-of-the-art performance. However, these methods often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to adapt to new domains, resulting in either insufficient learning capacity or redundant parameters. In this work, we propose BPG, a unified framework that addresses both challenges through two complementary components: BPG-Adapter, which dynamically determines each domain's adapter hidden dimension based on domain-specific feature separability, and BPG-Inference, a soft domain mixture strategy that integrates multiple domain-specific models at test time, mitigating domain ID misselection. Experimental results on DomainNet, CDDB, and CORe50 demonstrate that BPG consistently outperforms uniform adapter-based approaches and hard domain selection strategies, achieving state-of-the-art average accuracy while reducing forgetting to as low as 0.22% on DomainNet.

Explore similar work

May 7, 2026cs.AI

HEDP: A Hybrid Energy-Distance Prompt-based Framework for Domain Incremental Learning

Domain Incremental Learning is a critical scenario that requires models to continuously adapt to new data domains without retraining. However, domain shifts often cause severe performance degradation. To address this, we propose Hybrid Energy-Distance Prompt, a domain-incremental framework inspired by Helmholtz free energy. HEDP introduces an energy regularization loss to enhance the separability of domain representations and a hybrid energy-distance weighted mechanism that fuses energy-based and distance-based cues to improve domain selection and generalization. Experiments on multiple benchmarks, including CORe50, show that HEDP achieves superior performance on unseen domains with a 2.57% accuracy gain, effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting and enhancing open-world adaptability. Our code is \href{https://github.com/dannis97500/HEDP/}{available here}.
Yu Feng, Zhen Tian, Haoran Luo +8
Jul 2, 2026cs.CV

Dual-Selective Network for Domain-Incremental Change Detection

Domain-incremental change detection (DICD) continuously adapts models to new geographic domains while preserving prior knowledge. However, a structural mismatch exists: the label space remains fixed while domain characteristics vary drastically. Consequently, incremental models struggle to maintain stable spatial change representations across domains. Existing strategies, such as replay-based or regularization-based methods, often fail to scale to long domain sequences, leading to knowledge degradation or increased computational cost. We propose Dual-Selective Incremental Network (DSINet), a unified framework built on visual state space models. DSINet leverages Mamba's input-dependent selective mechanism through a selective spatial state unit (S3U). This unit preserves stable spatial change structures while filtering domain-specific variations during feature propagation. As a result, spatial representations remain stable across domains, preventing the accumulation of feature confusion over incremental steps. Additionally, we employ a concentration-balanced distillation (CBD) strategy to stabilize knowledge transfer across domains. It balances hardness and confidence concentration effects during incremental updates. This ensures reliable probability mass allocation and prevents over-smoothing or mode collapse during distillation. Together, these mechanisms maintain stable learning dynamics throughout incremental stages. Experimental results demonstrate that DSINet mitigates knowledge degradation across long domain sequences while maintaining the linear computational efficiency of state space models.
Yuzhi He, Junxi Huang, Haorui Wu +1
Jul 19, 2026cs.CV

Orthogonal Knowledge Refreshing for Domain-Incremental Object Detection

Domain-incremental object detection (DIOD) requires models to continually adapt to new domains while preserving prior knowledge. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning offers a promising avenue, wherein a pre-trained model is frozen and a small number of learnable parameters are injected for downstream tasks. However, these methods risk overwriting critical past knowledge, triggering inter-domain interference and performance degradation. To address this challenge, we propose Orthogonal Knowledge Refreshing (OKR), a simple yet effective framework for DIOD. OKR incrementally constructs independent domain-specific subspaces via dedicated low-rank branches for each domain, which are seamlessly fused for a holistic decision, enabling conflict-free capacity expansion without domain selection during inference. To minimize knowledge interference during fusion, we present a gradient-based orthogonal refreshing strategy that projects gradient updates of new domains onto the orthogonal complement of the fused historical subspace, supporting continual adaptation without forgetting. Moreover, to mitigate semantic fragmentation across domains, we enforce topology-aware consistency, aligning the semantic structures of old and new domains. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of OKR, outperforming the best exemplar-free method by significant margins of +5.6% and +6.5% mAP on the Pascal VOC and BDD100K series, respectively.
Aoting Zhang, Dongbao Yang, Chang Liu +3