arXiv Machine Learning

Continual Learning for VLMs: A Survey and Taxonomy Beyond Forgetting

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.

arXiv AI
Jul 15

Continual Learning with Elastic Regularization and Synthetic Replay for Federated MLLM Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2607. 12112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across distributed networks enables privacy-sensitive adaptation to evolving data streams, yet a fundamental obstacle prevents robust deployment in dynamic environments: catastrophic forgetting, wherein sequential task updates erase previously acquired knowledge across visual, linguistic, and cross-modal representations.

By Jing Liu, Chenxuanyin Zou, Jiayang Ren, Gaoyun Fang, Chengfang Li, Yan Wang, Zhenchao Ma, Bo Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Continual Learning with Vision-Language Models via Semantic-Geometry Preservation

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
arXiv AI
Jun 19

Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2510. 21978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models.

By Hoang Phan, Xianjun Yang, Yuanshun Yao, Jingyu Zhang, Shengjie Bi, Xiaocheng Tang, Madian Khabsa, Lijuan Liu, Deren Lei
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Does Forgetting Transfer Across Modalities? A Real-World Benchmark for Cross-Modal Knowledge Unlearning Evaluation

arXiv:2608. 03791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like Large Language Models (LLMs), may memorize sensitive, copyrighted, or harmful knowledge from their pretraining corpora.

By Chunlin Liu, Junnian Chen, Haitong Jiang, Jianyu Zhao, Yingsen Pang, Jingchen Li, Jiabiao He, Youming Lu, Jinhe Bi, Yuntao Du
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Understanding Cross-Modal Contributions in Continual Vision-Language Models: A Theoretical Perspective

arXiv:2606. 14883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual vision-language models are commonly addressed through sequential fine-tuning; however, although this paradigm enables adaptation to new environments (tasks), it inherently emphasizes the contribution of previously learned environments (tasks) at the expense of the stability required to preserve previously acquired knowledge.

By Salimeh Sekeh, Mary Wisell
arXiv AI
Jun 3

MUSE: A Unified Agentic Harness for MLLMs

arXiv:2606. 03005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite rapid progress, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) still fail on tasks that humans solve effortlessly, such as navigating a grid maze from a screenshot or selecting the correct puzzle piece.

By Jianglin Lu, Hailing Wang, Xu Ma, Qihua Dong, Mingyuan Zhang, Yizhou Wang, Yun Fu