XIL: Cross-Expanding Incremental Learning

Abstract

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) traditionally assumes that all tasks share a similar domain distribution, limiting its applicability in real-world scenarios where data arrive from evolving environments. We introduce a new problem setting, Cross-Expanding Incremental Learning (XIL), which extends CIL by requiring models to handle class-incremental data across distinct domains and to expand class-domain associations bidirectionally. In this setting, new classes should be integrated into previously seen domains, while earlier classes are extended to newly encountered ones, a capability we refer to as bidirectional domain transferability (BiDoT). To address XIL, we present a new framework, Semantic Expansion through Evolving Domains (XEED), which leverages domain-specialized prompts, residual-guided representation modulation, and evolving prototype embeddings to expand class semantics across previously encountered domains. We further introduce the BiDoT Score, a novel metric for quantifying the degree of BiDoT. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets with significant domain shifts demonstrate that XEED outperforms existing CIL baselines by a large margin in both standard accuracy and BiDoT scores, establishing a strong foundation for realistic continual learning under domain-evolving conditions.