ConSurv: Multimodal Continual Learning for Survival Analysis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yu, Dianzhi, Xiong, Conghao, Chen, Yankai, Cui, Wenqian, Zhang, Xinni, Zhang, Yifei, Chen, Hao, Sung, Joseph J. Y., King, Irwin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yu, Dianzhi
Xiong, Conghao
Chen, Yankai
Cui, Wenqian
Zhang, Xinni
Zhang, Yifei
Chen, Hao
Sung, Joseph J. Y.
King, Irwin
author_facet Yu, Dianzhi
Xiong, Conghao
Chen, Yankai
Cui, Wenqian
Zhang, Xinni
Zhang, Yifei
Chen, Hao
Sung, Joseph J. Y.
King, Irwin
contents Survival prediction of cancers is crucial for clinical practice, as it informs mortality risks and influences treatment plans. However, a static model trained on a single dataset fails to adapt to the dynamically evolving clinical environment and continuous data streams, limiting its practical utility. While continual learning (CL) offers a solution to learn dynamically from new datasets, existing CL methods primarily focus on unimodal inputs and suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting in survival prediction. In real-world scenarios, multimodal inputs often provide comprehensive and complementary information, such as whole slide images and genomics; and neglecting inter-modal correlations negatively impacts the performance. To address the two challenges of catastrophic forgetting and complex inter-modal interactions between gigapixel whole slide images and genomics, we propose ConSurv, the first multimodal continual learning (MMCL) method for survival analysis. ConSurv incorporates two key components: Multi-staged Mixture of Experts (MS-MoE) and Feature Constrained Replay (FCR). MS-MoE captures both task-shared and task-specific knowledge at different learning stages of the network, including two modality encoders and the modality fusion component, learning inter-modal relationships. FCR further enhances learned knowledge and mitigates forgetting by restricting feature deviation of previous data at different levels, including encoder-level features of two modalities and the fusion-level representations. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark integrating four datasets, Multimodal Survival Analysis Incremental Learning (MSAIL), for comprehensive evaluation in the CL setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConSurv outperforms competing methods across multiple metrics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09853
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ConSurv: Multimodal Continual Learning for Survival Analysis
Yu, Dianzhi
Xiong, Conghao
Chen, Yankai
Cui, Wenqian
Zhang, Xinni
Zhang, Yifei
Chen, Hao
Sung, Joseph J. Y.
King, Irwin
Machine Learning
Survival prediction of cancers is crucial for clinical practice, as it informs mortality risks and influences treatment plans. However, a static model trained on a single dataset fails to adapt to the dynamically evolving clinical environment and continuous data streams, limiting its practical utility. While continual learning (CL) offers a solution to learn dynamically from new datasets, existing CL methods primarily focus on unimodal inputs and suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting in survival prediction. In real-world scenarios, multimodal inputs often provide comprehensive and complementary information, such as whole slide images and genomics; and neglecting inter-modal correlations negatively impacts the performance. To address the two challenges of catastrophic forgetting and complex inter-modal interactions between gigapixel whole slide images and genomics, we propose ConSurv, the first multimodal continual learning (MMCL) method for survival analysis. ConSurv incorporates two key components: Multi-staged Mixture of Experts (MS-MoE) and Feature Constrained Replay (FCR). MS-MoE captures both task-shared and task-specific knowledge at different learning stages of the network, including two modality encoders and the modality fusion component, learning inter-modal relationships. FCR further enhances learned knowledge and mitigates forgetting by restricting feature deviation of previous data at different levels, including encoder-level features of two modalities and the fusion-level representations. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark integrating four datasets, Multimodal Survival Analysis Incremental Learning (MSAIL), for comprehensive evaluation in the CL setting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConSurv outperforms competing methods across multiple metrics.
title ConSurv: Multimodal Continual Learning for Survival Analysis
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09853