Parameter-Efficient Subspace Decoupling ViT for Mitigating Multi-Task Negative Transfer in Histological Scoring
Abstract
Histological scoring is essential for diagnosing Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD), yet its automation remains challenging due to the high annotation cost and negative transfer among the strongly correlated NAFLD Activity Score (NAS) indicators in multi-task learning. To address this issue, we propose a subspace-decoupled multi-task Vision Transformer (ViT) that integrates lightweight task-specific Adapters with orthogonality-based constraints. This design constructs independent feature subspaces for steatosis, ballooning, and inflammation, effectively reducing task interference while retaining shared representations. We further construct a curated multi-task mouse NAFLD histology dataset with expert annotations for all NAS components. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves multi-task stability and generalization with substantially reduced computational cost compared to training separate single-task models. The code and the curated dataset have been prepared and will be made publicly available upon acceptance to support reproducibility.
Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. Accepted by IEEE ICME 2026. Camera-ready version
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.29852,
title = {Parameter-Efficient Subspace Decoupling ViT for Mitigating Multi-Task Negative Transfer in Histological Scoring},
author = {Youhan Huang and Jiajun Li and Yilin Fang and Shuai Wang and Chuheng Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29852},
year = {2026}
}