The paper introduces a new task called Multimodal Unsupervised Continual Post-Training (MU‑CPT), which allows multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to continuously learn from streaming unlabeled data. It identifies token‑level visual dependence (VD) as essential for MU‑CPT, using its structural distortion to detect cross‑modal forgetting and its heterogeneity to guide new‑task learning. The proposed Visual Dependence‑Aware (VDA) framework includes Visually Constrained Optimal Transport (VC‑OT) to mitigate forgetting and Visually Modulated Adaptation (VMA) to enhance new‑task plasticity, achieving a balance between stability and adaptability in MU‑CPT.
By Kaichen Li, Zhilin Zhu, Jianhao Huang, Zhengqin Lai, Baochen Xiong, Zibo Shao, Yaguang Song, Linhui Xiao, Xiaoshan Yang, Changsheng Xu
In this paper, we explore a novel task of Multimodal Unsupervised Continual Post-Training (MU-CPT), enabling deployed MLLMs to continually evolve from streaming unlabeled data. Existing unsupervised p...
arXiv:2601. 22012v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting in continual learning is often measured at the performance or last-layer representation level, overlooking the underlying mechanisms.
By Sergi Masip, Gido M. van de Ven, Javier Ferrando, Tinne Tuytelaars
arXiv:2606. 16256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge.
By Mao-Lin Luo, Yi-Lin Zhang, Zi-Hao Zhou, Yankun Hong, Xialiang Tong, Mingxuan Yuan, Tong Wei, Min-Ling Zhang
arXiv:2606. 03598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have achieved remarkable success in language-conditioned robotic manipulation.
By Ziyang Chen, Shaoguang Wang, Weiyu Guo, Qianyi Cai, He Zhang, Pengteng Li, Yiren Zhao, Yandong Guo
arXiv:2508. 04227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs), spanning predictive architectures to generative Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have revolutionized artificial intelligence through powerful cross-modal alignment and zero-shot generalization.
By Yuyang Liu, Qiuhe Hong, Linlan Huang, Alexandra Gomez-Villa, Dipam Goswami, Tiantian Peng, Xialei Liu, Joost van de Weijer, Yonghong Tian
arXiv:2607. 27260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal continual learning (MMCL) aims to learn emerging knowledge from multimodal data while preserving knowledge.
By Zhen Zhang, Jielei Chu, Bin Liu, Tianrui Li
arXiv:2605. 20247v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting remains a major obstacle to continual learning in large language models (LLMs) and vision--language models (VLMs).
By Yang Liu, Toan Nguyen, Flora D. Salim
arXiv:2607. 09785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditionally, continual learning has assumed access to labeled data, yet many real-world applications -- such as lifelong robotics -- require models to adapt continuously from unlabeled streams.
By Sergi Masip, Alicja Dobrzeniecka, Jonathan Swinnen, Joachim Collin, Bart{\l}omiej Twardowski, Szymon {\L}ukasik, Tinne Tuytelaars
The paper introduces PromptCCZSL, a framework that enables vision‑language models to continually learn new attributes, objects, and their unique compositions while avoiding forgetting. It uses a frozen VLM backbone with prompt‑based techniques, recency‑weighted multi‑teacher distillation, and several loss functions (CAL, OPL, IDL) to maintain prior knowledge and promote diverse, distinct embeddings. Experiments on UT‑Zappos and C‑GQA show significant performance gains over existing VLM‑based and non‑VLM baselines, establishing a new benchmark for continual compositional zero‑shot learning.
By Sauda Maryam, Sara Nadeem, Faisal Qureshi, Mohsen Ali
arXiv:2609.00293v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We investigate how vision-language models (VLMs) handle context-memory conflicts; that is, situations in which the model is given information in contex...
By Athulith Paraselli, Etha Tianze Hua, Ellie Pavlick
arXiv:2603. 12055v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) is prone to catastrophic forgetting, yet current approaches adapt to new tasks without explicitly preserving the cross-modal semantic geometry inherited from pretraining and previous stages, allowing new-task supervision to induce geometric distortion.
By Chiyuan He, Zihuan Qiu, Fanman Meng, Runtong Zhang, Linfeng Xu, Qingbo Wu, Hongliang Li