Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yao, Yuang, Wu, Ruiqi, Zhou, Yi, Zhou, Tao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19320
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918069074395136
author Yao, Yuang
Wu, Ruiqi
Zhou, Yi
Zhou, Tao
author_facet Yao, Yuang
Wu, Ruiqi
Zhou, Yi
Zhou, Tao
contents Traditional fundus image analysis models focus on single-modal tasks, ignoring fundus modality complementarity, which limits their versatility. Recently, retinal foundation models have emerged, but most still remain modality-specific. Integrating multiple fundus imaging modalities into a single foundation model is valuable. However, in dynamic environments, data from different modalities often arrive incrementally, necessitating continual pre-training. To address this, we propose RetCoP, the first continual vision-language pre-training framework in the fundus domain, which incrementally integrates image and text features from different imaging modalities into a single unified foundation model. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting in continual pre-training, we introduce a rehearsal strategy utilizing representative image-text pairs and an off-diagonal information distillation approach. The former allows the model to revisit knowledge from previous stages, while the latter explicitly preserves the alignment between image and text representations. Experiments show that RetCoP outperforms all the compared methods, achieving the best generalization and lowest forgetting rate. The code can be found at https://github.com/Yuang-Yao/RetCoP.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_19320
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Retinal Vision-Language Pre-training upon Incremental Imaging Modalities
Yao, Yuang
Wu, Ruiqi
Zhou, Yi
Zhou, Tao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Traditional fundus image analysis models focus on single-modal tasks, ignoring fundus modality complementarity, which limits their versatility. Recently, retinal foundation models have emerged, but most still remain modality-specific. Integrating multiple fundus imaging modalities into a single foundation model is valuable. However, in dynamic environments, data from different modalities often arrive incrementally, necessitating continual pre-training. To address this, we propose RetCoP, the first continual vision-language pre-training framework in the fundus domain, which incrementally integrates image and text features from different imaging modalities into a single unified foundation model. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting in continual pre-training, we introduce a rehearsal strategy utilizing representative image-text pairs and an off-diagonal information distillation approach. The former allows the model to revisit knowledge from previous stages, while the latter explicitly preserves the alignment between image and text representations. Experiments show that RetCoP outperforms all the compared methods, achieving the best generalization and lowest forgetting rate. The code can be found at https://github.com/Yuang-Yao/RetCoP.
title Continual Retinal Vision-Language Pre-training upon Incremental Imaging Modalities
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19320