LLaVA-c: Continual Improved Visual Instruction Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Wenzhuo, Zhu, Fei, Guo, Haiyang, Wei, Longhui, Liu, Cheng-Lin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Wenzhuo
Zhu, Fei
Guo, Haiyang
Wei, Longhui
Liu, Cheng-Lin
author_facet Liu, Wenzhuo
Zhu, Fei
Guo, Haiyang
Wei, Longhui
Liu, Cheng-Lin
contents Multimodal models like LLaVA-1.5 achieve state-of-the-art visual understanding through visual instruction tuning on multitask datasets, enabling strong instruction-following and multimodal performance. However, multitask learning faces challenges such as task balancing, requiring careful adjustment of data proportions, and expansion costs, where new tasks risk catastrophic forgetting and need costly retraining. Continual learning provides a promising alternative to acquiring new knowledge incrementally while preserving existing capabilities. However, current methods prioritize task-specific performance, neglecting base model degradation from overfitting to specific instructions, which undermines general capabilities. In this work, we propose a simple but effective method with two modifications on LLaVA-1.5: spectral-aware consolidation for improved task balance and unsupervised inquiry regularization to prevent base model degradation. We evaluate both general and task-specific performance across continual pretraining and fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-c consistently enhances standard benchmark performance and preserves general capabilities. For the first time, we show that task-by-task continual learning can achieve results that match or surpass multitask joint learning. The code will be publicly released.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_08666
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLaVA-c: Continual Improved Visual Instruction Tuning
Liu, Wenzhuo
Zhu, Fei
Guo, Haiyang
Wei, Longhui
Liu, Cheng-Lin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimodal models like LLaVA-1.5 achieve state-of-the-art visual understanding through visual instruction tuning on multitask datasets, enabling strong instruction-following and multimodal performance. However, multitask learning faces challenges such as task balancing, requiring careful adjustment of data proportions, and expansion costs, where new tasks risk catastrophic forgetting and need costly retraining. Continual learning provides a promising alternative to acquiring new knowledge incrementally while preserving existing capabilities. However, current methods prioritize task-specific performance, neglecting base model degradation from overfitting to specific instructions, which undermines general capabilities. In this work, we propose a simple but effective method with two modifications on LLaVA-1.5: spectral-aware consolidation for improved task balance and unsupervised inquiry regularization to prevent base model degradation. We evaluate both general and task-specific performance across continual pretraining and fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that LLaVA-c consistently enhances standard benchmark performance and preserves general capabilities. For the first time, we show that task-by-task continual learning can achieve results that match or surpass multitask joint learning. The code will be publicly released.
title LLaVA-c: Continual Improved Visual Instruction Tuning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08666