Enhanced Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models with Model Fusion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gao, Haoyuan, Zhang, Zicong, Wei, Yuqi, Zhao, Linglan, Li, Guilin, Li, Yexin, Wang, Bo, Kong, Linghe, Huang, Weiran
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Gao, Haoyuan
Zhang, Zicong
Wei, Yuqi
Zhao, Linglan
Li, Guilin
Li, Yexin
Wang, Bo
Kong, Linghe
Huang, Weiran
author_facet Gao, Haoyuan
Zhang, Zicong
Wei, Yuqi
Zhao, Linglan
Li, Guilin
Li, Yexin
Wang, Bo
Kong, Linghe
Huang, Weiran
contents Vision-Language Models (VLMs) represent a significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence by integrating visual and textual modalities to achieve impressive zero-shot capabilities. However, VLMs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting when sequentially fine-tuned on multiple downstream tasks. Existing continual learning methods for VLMs face various limitations, often relying on additional reference datasets, compromising zero-shot performance, or being restricted to parameter-efficient fine-tuning scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Continual Decoupling-Unifying (ConDU) approach that pioneers the use of model fusion for continual learning in VLMs. Specifically, ConDU maintains a unified model along with task triggers and prototype sets, employing an iterative process of decoupling task experts for previous tasks and unifying them with the task expert for the newly learned task. Additionally, we introduce an inference strategy for zero-shot scenarios by aggregating predictions from multiple decoupled task experts. Extensive experiments on the MTIL benchmark show that ConDU achieves up to a 2\% improvement in average performance across all seen tasks compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while also enhancing zero-shot capabilities relative to the original VLM. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangzicong518/ConDU.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10705
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhanced Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models with Model Fusion
Gao, Haoyuan
Zhang, Zicong
Wei, Yuqi
Zhao, Linglan
Li, Guilin
Li, Yexin
Wang, Bo
Kong, Linghe
Huang, Weiran
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) represent a significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence by integrating visual and textual modalities to achieve impressive zero-shot capabilities. However, VLMs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting when sequentially fine-tuned on multiple downstream tasks. Existing continual learning methods for VLMs face various limitations, often relying on additional reference datasets, compromising zero-shot performance, or being restricted to parameter-efficient fine-tuning scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel Continual Decoupling-Unifying (ConDU) approach that pioneers the use of model fusion for continual learning in VLMs. Specifically, ConDU maintains a unified model along with task triggers and prototype sets, employing an iterative process of decoupling task experts for previous tasks and unifying them with the task expert for the newly learned task. Additionally, we introduce an inference strategy for zero-shot scenarios by aggregating predictions from multiple decoupled task experts. Extensive experiments on the MTIL benchmark show that ConDU achieves up to a 2\% improvement in average performance across all seen tasks compared to state-of-the-art baselines, while also enhancing zero-shot capabilities relative to the original VLM. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhangzicong518/ConDU.
title Enhanced Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models with Model Fusion
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10705