arXiv AI By Jing Liu, Chenxuanyin Zou, Jiayang Ren, Gaoyun Fang, Chengfang Li, Yan Wang, Zhenchao Ma, Bo Hu

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

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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.

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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 Machine Learning
Sep 3

DynaTokens: Controlling Token Dynamics for Continual Video-Language Understanding

The paper introduces DynaTokens, a transformer-based token generator that produces fine‑tuning tokens on demand for continual VideoQA with multimodal large language models. It uses shared generation weights and meta‑learning‑inspired regularisers to reduce task interference and forgetting, connecting the objective to sharpness‑aware optimisation for flatter cross‑task minima. Experiments on standard continual VideoQA benchmarks show that DynaTokens achieves higher average accuracy, lower forgetting, better zero‑shot generalisation, and robust cross‑modal transfer in a new ImageQA→VideoQA protocol.

By Toan Nguyen, Yang Liu, Celso De Melo, Flora D. Salim
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

A Visual Dependence-Aware Framework for Multimodal Unsupervised Continual Post-Training

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