Task-Agnostic Continual Learning for Chest Radiograph Classification

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.15811v1
• Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:47:30 GMT
• Title: Task-Agnostic Continual Learning for Chest Radiograph Classification
• Abstract summary: We study for the first time a task-incremental continual learning setting for chest radiograph classification.<n>We propose a continual adapter-based routing learning strategy for Chest X-rays (CARL-XRay) that maintains a fixed high-capacity backbone.<n> Experiments on large-scale public chest radiograph datasets demonstrate robust performance retention and reliable task-aware inference.
• Score: 8.562028149422883
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Clinical deployment of chest radiograph classifiers requires models that can be updated as new datasets become available without retraining on previously ob- served data or degrading validated performance. We study, for the first time, a task-incremental continual learning setting for chest radiograph classification, in which heterogeneous chest X-ray datasets arrive sequentially and task identifiers are unavailable at inference. We propose a continual adapter-based routing learning strategy for Chest X-rays (CARL-XRay) that maintains a fixed high-capacity backbone and incrementally allocates lightweight task-specific adapters and classifier heads. A latent task selector operates on task-adapted features and leverages both current and historical context preserved through compact prototypes and feature-level experience replay. This design supports stable task identification and adaptation across sequential updates while avoiding raw-image storage. Experiments on large-scale public chest radiograph datasets demonstrate robust performance retention and reliable task-aware inference under continual dataset ingestion. CARL-XRay outperforms joint training under task-unknown deployment, achieving higher routing accuracy (75.0\% vs.\ 62.5\%), while maintaining competitive diagnostic performance with AUROC of 0.74 in the oracle setting with ground-truth task identity and 0.75 under task-unknown inference, using significantly fewer trainable parameters. Finally, the proposed framework provides a practical alternative to joint training and repeated full retraining in continual clinical deployment.

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