DesCLIP: Robust Continual Learning via General Attribute Descriptions for VLM-Based Visual Recognition

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Hauptverfasser: He, Chiyuan, Qiu, Zihuan, Meng, Fanman, Xu, Linfeng, Wu, Qingbo, Li, Hongliang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author He, Chiyuan
Qiu, Zihuan
Meng, Fanman
Xu, Linfeng
Wu, Qingbo
Li, Hongliang
author_facet He, Chiyuan
Qiu, Zihuan
Meng, Fanman
Xu, Linfeng
Wu, Qingbo
Li, Hongliang
contents Continual learning of vision-language models (VLMs) focuses on leveraging cross-modal pretrained knowledge to incrementally adapt to expanding downstream tasks and datasets, while tackling the challenge of knowledge forgetting. Existing research often focuses on connecting visual features with specific class text in downstream tasks, overlooking the latent relationships between general and specialized knowledge. Our findings reveal that forcing models to optimize inappropriate visual-text matches exacerbates forgetting of VLM's recognition ability. To tackle this issue, we propose DesCLIP, which leverages general attribute (GA) descriptions to guide the understanding of specific class objects, enabling VLMs to establish robust vision-GA-class trilateral associations rather than relying solely on vision-class connections. Specifically, we introduce a language assistant to generate concrete GA description candidates via proper request prompts. Then, an anchor-based embedding filter is designed to obtain highly relevant GA description embeddings, which are leveraged as the paired text embeddings for visual-textual instance matching, thereby tuning the visual encoder. Correspondingly, the class text embeddings are gradually calibrated to align with these shared GA description embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advancements and efficacy of our proposed method, with comprehensive empirical evaluations highlighting its superior performance in VLM-based recognition compared to existing continual learning methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_00618
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DesCLIP: Robust Continual Learning via General Attribute Descriptions for VLM-Based Visual Recognition
He, Chiyuan
Qiu, Zihuan
Meng, Fanman
Xu, Linfeng
Wu, Qingbo
Li, Hongliang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Continual learning of vision-language models (VLMs) focuses on leveraging cross-modal pretrained knowledge to incrementally adapt to expanding downstream tasks and datasets, while tackling the challenge of knowledge forgetting. Existing research often focuses on connecting visual features with specific class text in downstream tasks, overlooking the latent relationships between general and specialized knowledge. Our findings reveal that forcing models to optimize inappropriate visual-text matches exacerbates forgetting of VLM's recognition ability. To tackle this issue, we propose DesCLIP, which leverages general attribute (GA) descriptions to guide the understanding of specific class objects, enabling VLMs to establish robust vision-GA-class trilateral associations rather than relying solely on vision-class connections. Specifically, we introduce a language assistant to generate concrete GA description candidates via proper request prompts. Then, an anchor-based embedding filter is designed to obtain highly relevant GA description embeddings, which are leveraged as the paired text embeddings for visual-textual instance matching, thereby tuning the visual encoder. Correspondingly, the class text embeddings are gradually calibrated to align with these shared GA description embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advancements and efficacy of our proposed method, with comprehensive empirical evaluations highlighting its superior performance in VLM-based recognition compared to existing continual learning methods.
title DesCLIP: Robust Continual Learning via General Attribute Descriptions for VLM-Based Visual Recognition
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00618