The paper introduces FPCD, a framework that stabilizes the modality gap in vision‑language models during continual learning. It combines Fast Null‑space Projection, which projects gradients onto approximate null spaces to reduce interference, with Contrastive Distillation that aligns image‑to‑text and text‑to‑image similarity distributions using a small reference set. On the 11‑task MTIL benchmark, FPCD achieves strong performance, maintaining stable modality gaps and superior zero‑shot retrieval on COCO Captions and Flickr30k.
arXiv:2608.21487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit strong zero-shot capabilities, making them an attractive solution for continual learning across diverse tasks....
arXiv:2602. 07026v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite the success of multimodal contrastive learning in aligning visual and linguistic representations, a persistent geometric anomaly, the Modality Gap, remains: embeddings of distinct modalities expressing identical semantics occupy systematically offset regions.
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: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.
The paper investigates how the modality gap— the separation between image and text representations in contrastive vision‑language models—affects different downstream tasks. By showing that a single dominant direction accounts for most of the image‑text mean separation, the authors explain why reducing or removing this gap can improve zero‑shot classification, degrade retrieval, or restore performance depending on the task. The study provides a geometric framework that clarifies when and why gap interventions should be applied in vision‑language systems.
arXiv:2510.21175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization, enabling deployment in a wide range...
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.
The paper introduces SubTTA, a test-time adaptation method for vision‑language models that aligns the semantic subspaces of visual and textual modalities to improve zero‑shot predictions. It addresses two issues: the modality gap caused by distribution shifts and visual nuisance that masks task‑specific semantics. By minimizing chordal distance between principal subspaces and projecting visual features onto a task‑specific textual subspace, SubTTA refines decision boundaries and achieves an average 2.24% improvement over existing TTA methods.
arXiv:2607. 26947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on a projector to align visual representations with the language embedding space, making it central to cross-modal understanding.
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.
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:2610.04792v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Missing modality remains a longstanding challenge in multimodal learning. Existing methods typically address this issue through modality recovery o...