Domain-Agnostic Incremental Learning for Sound Classification. A DCASE 2026 Challenge task

Abstract

This paper presents the Domain-Agnostic Incremental Learning for Audio Classification Task of the DCASE 2026 Challenge. Incremental learning refers to sequentially learning new tasks with the same system while maintaining its knowledge and performance on the previously learned task. Domain-incremental learning for sound classification refers to learning the same sound classes but in different acoustic domains, and was formalized as a data challenge for the first time in DCASE 2026. Participants will train a system to learn ten sound classes in three different domains, with learning at each incremental task not having access to previous task data. Submitted systems will be ranked by the overall average accuracy calculated over the three domains. During the development stage, the provided baseline system obtains a modest performance of 52.5\% accuracy over the last two domains, mostly due to erroneous inference of the domain for the test sample.