iDPA: Instance Decoupled Prompt Attention for Incremental Medical Object Detection

Existing prompt-based approaches have demonstrated impressive performance in continual learning, leveraging pre-trained large-scale models for classification tasks; however, the tight coupling between foreground-background information and the coupled attention between prompts and image-text tokens present significant challenges in incremental medical object detection tasks, due to the conceptual gap between medical and natural domains. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the \method~framework, which comprises two main components: 1) Instance-level Prompt Generation (\ipg), which decouples fine-grained instance-level knowledge from images and generates prompts that focus on dense predictions, and 2) Decoupled Prompt Attention (\dpa), which decouples the original prompt attention, enabling a more direct and efficient transfer of prompt information while reducing memory usage and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. We collect 13 clinical, cross-modal, multi-organ, and multi-category datasets, referred to as \dataset, and experiments demonstrate that \method~outperforms existing SOTA methods, with FAP improvements of 5.44\%, 4.83\%, 12.88\%, and 4.59\% in full data, 1-shot, 10-shot, and 50-shot settings, respectively.

@article{yi2025_2506.00406,
  title={ iDPA: Instance Decoupled Prompt Attention for Incremental Medical Object Detection },
  author={ Huahui Yi and Wei Xu and Ziyuan Qin and Xi Chen and Xiaohu Wu and Kang Li and Qicheng Lao },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.00406},
  year={ 2025 }
}