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
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: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: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:2607. 02020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models must continually adapt to evolving tasks and domains, yet standard continual learning metrics mainly measure whether old answers remain correct, leaving the stability of multimodal grounding largely unexamined.
By Qianyu Chen, Canran Xiao, Runxuan Tang
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:2603.06662v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Continual VideoQA with multimodal LLMs remains challenging because sequential adaptation induces task interference, while storing task-specif...
By Toan Nguyen, Yang Liu, Celso De Melo, Flora D. Salim
arXiv:2607. 09202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning commonly relies on post-hoc mechanisms such as replay, elastic regularization, or distillation.
By Julius St\"ork
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: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: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. 04364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual post-training is becoming a central paradigm for adapting vision-language models to evolving tasks.
By Mao-Lin Luo, Zhe-Xu Wang, Zi-Hao Zhou, Bo Ye, Jian Zhao, Min-Ling Zhang, Tong Wei