arXiv:2604.17089cs.LG2026-04

用规则树保持解释性,实现医疗数据持续学习不遗忘。

Tree of Concepts: Interpretable Continual Learners in Non-Stationary Clinical Domains

  • 用浅层决策树构建固定概念接口,模型通过概念推理
  • 在多个医疗数据集上稳定性和适应性优于现有方法
  • 适合需要可解释性的高风险场景如临床诊断系统

持续学习旨在分布变化下更新模型而不遗忘,但医疗等高风险场景还要求可解释性。实践中,表现良好的深度模型通常不可解释,而可解释的模型(如决策树)在分布漂移下易失效,难以兼顾两者。为此,我们提出 Tree of Concepts 框架:使用浅层决策树定义固定的规则化概念接口,并训练一个概念瓶颈模型从原始特征预测这些概念。持续更新仅作用于概念提取器和标签头,保持概念语义稳定,确保解释不随时间漂移。在多个表格型医疗基准数据集上,该方法在持续学习协议下实现了比现有基线(包括回放增强方法)更强的稳定性-可塑性权衡。结果表明,结构化概念接口可在非平稳、高风险领域支持持续适应并维持一致的可审计接口。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Continual learning aims to update models under distribution shift without forgetting, yet many high-stakes deployments, such as healthcare, also require interpretability. In practice, models that adapt well (e.g., deep networks) are often opaque, while models that are interpretable (e.g., decision trees) are brittle under shift, making it difficult to achieve both properties simultaneously. In response, we propose Tree of Concepts, an interpretable continual learning framework that uses a shallow decision tree to define a fixed, rule-based concept interface and trains a concept bottleneck model to predict these concepts from raw features. Continual updates act on the concept extractor and label head while keeping concept semantics stable over time, yielding explanations that do not drift across sequential updates. On multiple tabular healthcare benchmarks under continual learning protocols, our method achieves a stronger stability-plasticity trade-off than existing baselines, including replay-enhanced variants. Our results suggest that structured concept interfaces can support continual adaptation while preserving a consistent audit interface in non-stationary, high-stakes domains.

持续学习医疗AI可解释性决策树

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