Parameter isolation with domain-specific experts for incremental audio classification

Abstract:To successfully deploy a model in time-varying environments such as streaming data prediction and sensing control, domain-incremental learning (DIL) has attracted attention since it aims to adapt a previously trained model to newly arriving domains, while reserving knowledge from earlier domains without accessing their data. Incremental learning across domains can be regarded as a recurrent update, in which the current model is obtained by updating the model carried over from previous domains. Conventional DIL approaches that rely on domain-invariant feature learning and weight regularization gradually overwrite or constrain parameters learned in previous domains, leading to catastrophic forgetting. Instead, this paper proposes a new domain-specific parameter-isolation architecture that retains all past domains. The proposed architecture mitigates catastrophic forgetting through a full-order recurrent update, constructing a new expert using domain-specific data conditioned on all previously frozen models. To achieve this, we incorporate data-free generative replay to reconstruct previous-domain data and cross-domain feature generation to recover later expert features missing from earlier domain samples. Finally, we apply the proposed model architecture to domain-agnostic incremental learning for audio classification, as defined in the DCASE 2026 Challenge Task 7. Consequently, we achieve micro and macro accuracies of 78.4% and 78.9%, respectively, representing increases of 33 and 25 percentage points over the Challenge baseline. Ablation studies are conducted to examine the effectiveness of each processing component in terms of classification accuracy.

5 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables. Accepted to the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) Workshop 2026

Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Sound (cs.SD)

arXiv:2609.14730 [eess.AS]

(or arXiv:2609.14730v1 [eess.AS] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.14730 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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