Continual Learning on CLIP via Incremental Prompt Tuning with Intrinsic Textual Anchors

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Lu, Haodong, Zhang, Xinyu, Moore, Kristen, Xue, Jason, Yao, Lina, Hengel, Anton van den, Gong, Dong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866912775078412288
author Lu, Haodong
Zhang, Xinyu
Moore, Kristen
Xue, Jason
Yao, Lina
Hengel, Anton van den
Gong, Dong
author_facet Lu, Haodong
Zhang, Xinyu
Moore, Kristen
Xue, Jason
Yao, Lina
Hengel, Anton van den
Gong, Dong
contents Continual learning (CL) enables deep networks to acquire new knowledge while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. The powerful generalization ability of pre-trained models (PTMs), such as the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, has inspired a range of CL methods targeting new and specialized tasks, providing rich multi-modal embeddings that support lightweight, incremental prompt tuning. Existing methods often rely on complex designs built upon specific assumptions, such as intricate regularization schemes for prompt pools, specialized routing mechanisms, or multi-stage incrementations, that introduce additional-and possibly unnecessary-complexity, underutilizing CLIP's intrinsic capabilities. In this paper, we propose a concise CL approach for CLIP based on incremental prompt tuning that fully exploits its multi-modal structure and the stability of textual representations. Our method, Textual Prototype-guided Prompt Tuning (TPPT), introduces textual prototypes not merely as static classifiers, as in existing methods, but as stable anchors to guide the learning of visual prompts, thereby shaping the embedding space (i.e., TPPT-V). We show that our bidirectional supervision strategy enables more effective learning of new knowledge while reducing forgetting. To further close the vision-language gap during CL, we jointly optimizes visual and textual prompts (i.e., TPPT-VT). We also introduce a relational diversity regularization on the textual anchors to prevent embedding space collapse and mitigate correlated forgetting. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, highlighting the benefits of leveraging CLIP's intrinsic guidance for continual adaptation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_20680
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Learning on CLIP via Incremental Prompt Tuning with Intrinsic Textual Anchors
Lu, Haodong
Zhang, Xinyu
Moore, Kristen
Xue, Jason
Yao, Lina
Hengel, Anton van den
Gong, Dong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Continual learning (CL) enables deep networks to acquire new knowledge while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. The powerful generalization ability of pre-trained models (PTMs), such as the Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, has inspired a range of CL methods targeting new and specialized tasks, providing rich multi-modal embeddings that support lightweight, incremental prompt tuning. Existing methods often rely on complex designs built upon specific assumptions, such as intricate regularization schemes for prompt pools, specialized routing mechanisms, or multi-stage incrementations, that introduce additional-and possibly unnecessary-complexity, underutilizing CLIP's intrinsic capabilities. In this paper, we propose a concise CL approach for CLIP based on incremental prompt tuning that fully exploits its multi-modal structure and the stability of textual representations. Our method, Textual Prototype-guided Prompt Tuning (TPPT), introduces textual prototypes not merely as static classifiers, as in existing methods, but as stable anchors to guide the learning of visual prompts, thereby shaping the embedding space (i.e., TPPT-V). We show that our bidirectional supervision strategy enables more effective learning of new knowledge while reducing forgetting. To further close the vision-language gap during CL, we jointly optimizes visual and textual prompts (i.e., TPPT-VT). We also introduce a relational diversity regularization on the textual anchors to prevent embedding space collapse and mitigate correlated forgetting. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, highlighting the benefits of leveraging CLIP's intrinsic guidance for continual adaptation.
title Continual Learning on CLIP via Incremental Prompt Tuning with Intrinsic Textual Anchors
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20680