arXiv Machine Learning By Tiantian Peng, Yuyang Liu, Shuo Yang, Qiuhe Hong, YongHong Tian

Stabilizing the Modality Gap: Null-Space Projected Continual Learning for Vision-Language Models

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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.

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