arXiv AI

Progressive Multimodal Alignment for Continual Instruction Tuning

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.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

LLaVAFlow: Preserving Latent Alignment Flow for Parameter-Efficient Multimodal Fine-Tuning

LLaVAFlow is an information‑theoretic distillation framework designed to preserve cross‑modal alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models during visual instruction tuning. It compresses the mutual information between extracted relations and MLLM embeddings to refine alignment flow, and then maximizes mutual information between pretrained and fine‑tuned alignment flows to transfer compact alignment information. Experiments demonstrate that LLaVAFlow effectively maintains alignment flow, improving downstream performance and generalization.

By Muyao Yuan, Muyan Jiao, Jiangyong Ying, Weizhan Zhang, Yuanhong Zhang, Lan Ma, Yuan Gao, Haipeng Du
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

ProtoAda: Prototype-Guided Adaptive Adapter Expansion and Geometric Consolidation for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning

arXiv:2606. 02576v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance through instruction tuning, but real-world deployment requires them to continually acquire new vision-language capabilities, making Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) essential.

By Yu-Cheng Shi, Zhen-Hao Xie, Jun-Tao Tang, Da-Wei Zhou
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Dynamic Alignment Compensation for Hallucination Mitigation in Large Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Dynamic Alignment Compensation (DAC), a training‑free inference‑time technique designed to reduce hallucinations in Large Vision‑Language Models (LVLMs). DAC monitors cross‑modal representation drift across decoder layers and generation steps, applying lightweight residual compensation through Layer‑wise Semantic Compensation and Sequential Semantic Correction. Experiments on nine multimodal benchmarks across various LVLM backbones demonstrate that DAC consistently lowers hallucination rates while preserving overall performance.

By Kairong Yu, Zixin Zhu, Le Yu, Hongwei Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 28

VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation

The paper introduces Vision-Free Adaptation (VFA), a method that separates multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment in multimodal large language models. VFA fine‑tunes a base LLM on multilingual text to create a multilingual task vector, which is then merged with the vision‑aligned task vector of an existing MLLM. Experiments on five MLLMs and six multilingual benchmarks show consistent gains while preserving multimodal and text‑only performance, and using less than 2% of text data narrows the performance gap to fully multimodal‑trained models.

By Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
arXiv AI
Jul 14

PivotMerge: Bridging Heterogeneous Multimodal Pre-training via Post-Alignment Model Merging

arXiv:2604. 22823v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on multimodal pre-training over diverse data sources, where different datasets often induce complementary cross-modal alignment capabilities.

By Zibo Shao, Baochen Xiong, Xiaoshan Yang, Yaguang Song, Qimeng Zhang, Haifeng Chen, Changsheng Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

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.

By Yuyang Liu, Qiuhe Hong, Linlan Huang, Alexandra Gomez-Villa, Dipam Goswami, Tiantian Peng, Xialei Liu, Joost van de Weijer, Yonghong Tian
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

CRAM: Centroid-Routing and Adaptive MoE for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning

CRAM (Centroid‑Routing and Adaptive MoE) is a method for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning that isolates task‑specific patterns into independent modules to reduce catastrophic forgetting. It uses adaptive‑rank instantiation to allocate only the necessary parameters for new tasks, and centroid‑guided routing with an orthogonality penalty to reuse existing experts while preventing interference. Experiments on diverse benchmarks show CRAM outperforms existing approaches.

By Jun-Tao Tang, Zhen-Hao Xie, Yu-Cheng Shi, Da-Wei Zhou
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Modality Gap-Driven Subspace Alignment Training Paradigm For Multimodal Large Language Models

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.

By Xiaomin Yu, Yi Xin, Yuhui Zhang, Wenjie Zhang, Chonghan Liu, Hanzhen Zhao, Chen Liu, Xiaoxing Hu, Ziyue Qiao, Hao Tang, Xiaobin Hu, Chengwei Qin, Hui Xiong, Yu Qiao, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

SAME: Stabilized Mixture-of-Experts for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning

The paper introduces SAME (Stabilized Mixture-of-Experts) to address challenges in Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) for large language models. SAME mitigates router drift by decomposing routing dynamics into orthogonal subspaces and updating only task-relevant directions, while preventing expert drift through curvature‑aware scaling that uses historical input covariance without rehearsal. The method also employs adaptive expert activation to freeze selected experts during training, reducing redundant computation and cross‑task interference, and demonstrates state‑of‑the‑art performance on a new long‑task‑sequence benchmark.

By Zhen-Hao Xie, Jun-Tao Tang, Yu-Cheng Shi, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan, Da-Wei Zhou