INTR++: INterpretable TRansformer with better Accuracy, Interpretability, and Adaptability

Visual prompting has emerged as a powerful method for adapting pre-trained models to new domains without updating model parameters. However, existing prompting methods typically optimize a single prompt per domain and apply it uniformly to all inputs, limiting their ability to generalize under intra and inter-domain variability, which is especially critical in the medical field. To address this, we propose APEX, an Adaptive Prompt EXtraction framework that retrieves input-specific prompts from a learnable prompt memory. The memory stores diverse, domain-discriminative prompt representations and is queried via domain features extracted from the Fourier spectrum. To learn robust and discriminative domain features, we introduce a novel Low-Frequency Feature Contrastive (LFC) learning framework that clusters representations from the same domain while separating those from different domains. Extensive experiments on two medical segmentation tasks demonstrate that APEX significantly improves generalization across both seen and unseen domains. Furthermore, it complements any existing backbones and consistently enhances performance, confirming its effectiveness as a plug-and-play prompting solution in medical fields. The code is available at https://github.com/cetinkayaevren/apex/

Medical AI systems must remain reliable as data distributions shift across hospitals, imaging devices, and patient populations, yet privacy constraints often prevent storing or revisiting past patient data. We present UniPrompt-CL, a rehearsal-free domain-incremental learning framework for medical image classification using a single backbone and a single inference. Rather than relying on multiple backbones, repeated ViT inferences, or independent layer-wise prompt pools, UniPrompt-CL shares a unified prompt pool across transformer layers and expands it with only a few prompts per new domain. This reduces cross-layer redundancy while enabling efficient adaptation. On diabetic retinopathy, UniPrompt-CL improves average accuracy by 2.0 percentage points and substantially reduces forgetting relative to the strongest backbone-matched baseline. On skin cancer, it achieves competitive accuracy at the lowest training cost among DINOv2-B configurations. A controlled comparison varying only pool organization shows that the benefit arises from retention rather than learning each new domain: it is largest on the medical benchmarks, smaller on OfficeHome, and reverses on a heterogeneous six-stage DomainNet stream. These results suggest that cross-layer prompt sharing with lightweight expansion is practical for medical models requiring repeated retraining under limited on-site compute, while identifying the domain shifts under which it helps.

Vision-language models such as CLIP achieve strong visual-textual alignment, but often suffer from overfitting and limited interpretability when adapted through continuous prompt learning. While discrete prompt optimization improves interpretability, it usually depends on large external models, leading to high computational costs and limited scalability. In this paper, we propose Interpretable Prompt Learning (IPL), a hybrid framework that alternates between discrete semantic token selection and continuous prompt optimization. Specifically, IPL formulates semantic token selection as an approximate submodular optimization problem, encouraging tokens that are both human-understandable and semantically diverse. It further adopts an alternating optimization strategy to integrate discrete token selection with continuous prompt tuning, improving interpretability while preserving adaptability to downstream tasks. Our framework is plug-and-play, allowing seamless integration with existing prompt learning methods. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that IPL consistently improves both interpretability and accuracy across five representative prompt learning methods, providing an effective and scalable extension to existing frameworks.