Learning without Forgetting for Vision-Language Models

Da-Wei Zhou, Yuanhan Zhang, Jingyi Ning, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan, Ziwei Liu

Primary Area: transfer learning, meta learning, and lifelong learning

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Keywords: class-incremental learning, vision-language model tuning

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Abstract: Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) or continual learning is a desired capability in the real world, which requires a learning system to adapt to new tasks without forgetting former ones. While traditional CIL methods focus on visual information to grasp core features, recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLM) have shown promising capabilities in learning generalizable representations with the aid of textual information. However, when continually trained with new classes, VLMs often suffer from catastrophic forgetting of former knowledge. Applying VLMs to CIL poses two major challenges: 1) how to adapt the model without forgetting; and 2) how to make full use of the multi-modal information. To this end, we propose PROjectiOn Fusion (PROOF) that enables VLMs to learn without forgetting. To handle the first challenge, we propose training task-specific projections based on the frozen image/text encoders. When facing new tasks, new projections are expanded, and former projections are fixed, alleviating the forgetting of old concepts. For the second challenge, we propose the fusion module to better utilize the cross-modality information. By jointly adjusting visual and textual features, the model can capture better semantic information. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets with various continual learning scenarios and various VLMs validate PROOF achieves state-of-the-art performance.

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Submission Number: 1667