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

TL;DR

MILE introduces a modular, efficient framework using LoRA experts for continual semantic segmentation across domains and modalities, balancing performance, scalability, and parameter efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel LoRA-based expert framework with a gating mechanism, overcoming scalability issues of previous expert-based continual learning methods.

Findings

MILE achieves strong performance on domain and modality benchmarks.

It requires minimal parameter increase per task.

MILE maintains stability and plasticity in continual learning scenarios.

Abstract

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.