Ask and Remember: A Questions-Only Replay Strategy for Continual Visual Question Answering

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Marouf, Imad Eddine, Tartaglione, Enzo, Lathuiliere, Stephane, van de Weijer, Joost
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Marouf, Imad Eddine
Tartaglione, Enzo
Lathuiliere, Stephane
van de Weijer, Joost
author_facet Marouf, Imad Eddine
Tartaglione, Enzo
Lathuiliere, Stephane
van de Weijer, Joost
contents Continual Learning in Visual Question Answering (VQACL) requires models to acquire new visual-linguistic skills (plasticity) while preserving previously learned knowledge (stability). The inherent multimodality of VQACL exacerbates this challenge, as models must balance stability across visual and textual domains while adapting to novel objects and reasoning tasks. Existing methods, primarily designed for unimodal settings, often fall short in addressing this dual requirement. In this work, we present QUestion-only replay with Attention Distillation (QUAD), a novel approach for VQACL that leverages only past task questions for regularization. By eliminating the need to store visual data, QUAD not only reduces memory overhead, but also alleviates privacy concerns. Our method introduces a Question-only Replay mechanism that selectively reuses prior task questions to counteract overfitting to the answer space of the current task, addressing the problem out of answer set. Complementing this, we propose Attention Consistency Distillation to enforce both intra-modal and inter-modal attention consistency across tasks, preserving essential visual-linguistic associations. Extensive experiments on VQAv2 and NExT-QA demonstrate that QUAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving robust performance in continual VQA. Code is available at: https://github.com/IemProg/QUAD.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_04469
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Ask and Remember: A Questions-Only Replay Strategy for Continual Visual Question Answering
Marouf, Imad Eddine
Tartaglione, Enzo
Lathuiliere, Stephane
van de Weijer, Joost
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Continual Learning in Visual Question Answering (VQACL) requires models to acquire new visual-linguistic skills (plasticity) while preserving previously learned knowledge (stability). The inherent multimodality of VQACL exacerbates this challenge, as models must balance stability across visual and textual domains while adapting to novel objects and reasoning tasks. Existing methods, primarily designed for unimodal settings, often fall short in addressing this dual requirement. In this work, we present QUestion-only replay with Attention Distillation (QUAD), a novel approach for VQACL that leverages only past task questions for regularization. By eliminating the need to store visual data, QUAD not only reduces memory overhead, but also alleviates privacy concerns. Our method introduces a Question-only Replay mechanism that selectively reuses prior task questions to counteract overfitting to the answer space of the current task, addressing the problem out of answer set. Complementing this, we propose Attention Consistency Distillation to enforce both intra-modal and inter-modal attention consistency across tasks, preserving essential visual-linguistic associations. Extensive experiments on VQAv2 and NExT-QA demonstrate that QUAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving robust performance in continual VQA. Code is available at: https://github.com/IemProg/QUAD.
title Ask and Remember: A Questions-Only Replay Strategy for Continual Visual Question Answering
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04469