Domain-Incremental Learning

Latest papers 36

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 available here.
May 5, 2026cs.LG

A Domain Incremental Continual Learning Benchmark for ICU Time Series Model Transportability

In recent years, machine learning has made significant progress in clinical outcome prediction, demonstrating increasingly accurate results. However, the substantial resources required for hospitals to train these models, such as data collection, labeling, and computational power, limit the feasibility for smaller hospitals to develop their own models. An alternative approach involves transferring a machine learning model trained by a large hospital to smaller hospitals, allowing them to fine-tune the model on their specific patient data. However, these models are often trained and validated on data from a single hospital, raising concerns about their generalizability to new data. Our research shows that there are notable differences in measurement distributions and frequencies across various regions in the United States. To address this, we propose a benchmark that tests a machine learning model's ability to transfer from a source domain to different regions across the country. This benchmark assesses a model's capacity to learn meaningful information about each new domain while retaining key features from the original domain. Using this benchmark, we frame the transfer of a machine learning model from one region to another as a domain incremental learning problem. While the task of patient outcome prediction remains the same, the input data distribution varies, necessitating a model that can effectively manage these shifts. We evaluate two popular domain incremental learning methods: data replay, which stores examples from previous data sources for fine-tuning on the current source, and Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), a model parameter regularization method that maintains features important for both data sources.
May 5, 2026cs.CV

MILE: Mixture of Incremental LoRA Experts for Continual Semantic Segmentation across Domains and Modalities

Continual semantic segmentation requires models to adapt to new domains or modalities without sacrificing performance on previously learned tasks. Expert-based learning, in which task-specific modules specialize in different domains, has proven effective in mitigating forgetting. These methods include dynamic expansion, which suffers from scalability issues, or parameter isolation, which constrains the ability to learn new tasks. We introduce Mixture of Incremental LoRA Experts (MILE), a modular and parameter-efficient framework for continual segmentation across both domains and modalities. MILE leverages Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to instantiate lightweight experts for each new task while keeping the pretrained base network frozen. Each expert is trained exclusively on its task data, thus avoids overwriting previously learned information. A prototype-guided gating mechanism dynamically selects the most appropriate expert at inference. MILE achieves the benefits of expert-based learning while overcoming its scalability limitations. It requires only a marginal parameter increase per task and tens of LoRA adapters are needed before matching the size of a single full model, making it highly efficient in both training and storage. Across domain- and modality-incremental benchmarks, MILE achieves strong performance while ensuring better stability, plasticity, and scalability.
Apr 20, 2026cs.CV

Enhancing Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models via Dynamic Prefix Weighting

We investigate recently introduced domain-class incremental learning scenarios for vision-language models (VLMs). Recent works address this challenge using parameter-efficient methods, such as prefix-tuning or adapters, which facilitate model adaptation to downstream tasks by incorporating task-specific information into input tokens through additive vectors. However, previous approaches often normalize the weights of these vectors, disregarding the fact that different input tokens require different degrees of adjustment. To overcome this issue, we propose Dynamic Prefix Weighting (DPW), a framework that dynamically assigns weights to prefixes, complemented by adapters. DPW consists of 1) a gating module that adjusts the weights of each prefix based on the importance of the corresponding input token, and 2) a weighting mechanism that derives adapter output weights as a residual of prefix-tuning weights, ensuring that adapters are utilized only when necessary. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in domain-class incremental learning scenarios for VLMs. The code is available at: https://github.com/YonseiML/dpw.
Apr 10, 2026cs.RO

Towards Lifelong Aerial Autonomy: Geometric Memory Management for Continual Visual Place Recognition in Dynamic Environments

Robust geo-localization under changing environmental and operational conditions is critical for long-term aerial autonomy. Aerial visual place recognition (VPR) commonly uses pre-acquired remote-sensing imagery of the intended operating area, so the geographic label space can remain fixed while successive airborne missions introduce substantial visual distribution shifts. Continual adaptation to these shifts can cause catastrophic forgetting. We therefore formulate aerial VPR as a mission-based domain-incremental learning (DIL) problem and develop a heterogeneous memory framework. Before sequential adaptation, the satellite reference dataset is used once to train the initial model and construct a static satellite exemplar memory; a bounded replay buffer then retains selected airborne observations across missions. For replay management, we compare loss- and diversity-based selection criteria and introduce DBS-Hybrid, which combines prototype-based diversity trimming with representative-first feature-space coverage. Experiments on 21 visible and infrared UAV missions evaluate generalization to held-out missions, immediate adaptation, and knowledge retention. Under the primary Forward mission order, DBS-Hybrid achieves the highest mean final average accuracy, generalization, and knowledge retention among the evaluated methods, improving over the Random baseline by 5.065.06, 5.325.32, and 6.336.33 percentage points, respectively, and improving backward transfer from -6.41% to 1.07%. Across five additional random mission orders, DBS-Hybrid ranks second in mean final average accuracy, backward transfer, generalization, and knowledge retention. Overall, heterogeneous memory and diversity-aware replay provide an effective basis for continual aerial VPR in mapped operating areas.
Apr 3, 2026cs.CV

ProtoFlow: Mitigating Forgetting in Class-Incremental Remote Sensing Segmentation via Low-Curvature Prototype Flow

Remote sensing segmentation in real deployment is inherently continual: new semantic categories emerge, and acquisition conditions shift across seasons, cities, and sensors. Despite recent progress, many incremental approaches still treat training steps as isolated updates, which leaves representation drift and forgetting insufficiently controlled. We present ProtoFlow, a time-aware prototype dynamics framework that models class prototypes as trajectories and learns their evolution with an explicit temporal vector field. By jointly enforcing low-curvature motion and inter-class separation, ProtoFlow stabilizes prototype geometry throughout incremental learning. Experiments on standard class- and domain-incremental remote sensing benchmarks show consistent gains over strong baselines, including up to 1.5-2.0 points improvement in mIoUall, together with reduced forgetting. These results suggest that explicitly modeling temporal prototype evolution is a practical and interpretable strategy for robust continual remote sensing segmentation. Open-source code:https://github.com/dudududke/protoflow.