Language as an Anchor: Preserving Relative Visual Geometry for Domain Incremental Learning

Abstract: A key challenge in Domain Incremental Learning (DIL) is to continually learn under shifting distributions while preserving knowledge from previous domains. Existing methods face a fundamental dilemma. On one hand, projecting all domains into a single unified visual space leads to inter-domain interference and semantic distortion, as large shifts may vary with not only visual appearance but also underlying semantics. On the other hand, isolating domain-specific parameters causes knowledge fragmentation, creating "knowledge islands" that hamper knowledge reuse and exacerbate forgetting. To address this issue, we propose LAVA (Language-Anchored Visual Alignment), a novel DIL framework that replaces direct feature alignment with relative alignment driven by a text-based reference anchor. LAVA guides the visual representations of each incoming domain to preserve a consistent relative geometry, which is defined by mirroring the pairwise semantic similarities between the class names. This anchored geometric structure acts as a bridge across domains, enabling the retrieval of class-aware prior knowledge and facilitating robust feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on standard DIL benchmarks demonstrate that LAVA achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-arts. Code is available at https://github.com/ShuyiGeng/LAVA.