arXiv subjects

Tiantian Peng

Publications and source records attributed to Tiantian Peng.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reasoning Portability: Guiding Continual Learning for MLLMs in the RLVR Era

Vision-Language Models in Continual Learning (VLM-CL) aim to continuously adapt to new multimodal tasks while retaining prior knowledge. The emerging paradigm that couples Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) calls for a new pattern to guide continual adaptation. Advances in reasoning capability now make it feasible to impose constraints at the reasoning level. We formalize portability, a sample-level measure of how reusable the previous policy's behavior is on a new task, and empirically show that reasoning-level signals remain reliable on out-of-distribution samples while answer-level signals do not. We instantiate this as Reasoning Portability (RP) and propose Reasoning-based Dynamic Balance Continual Learning (RDB-CL), which modulates the per-sample Kullback-Leibler regularization in RLVR according to RP: a tight anchor preserves reusable reasoning on high-RP samples, while a relaxed anchor on low-RP samples permits exploration of new reasoning pathways. Experiments show that RDB-CL consistently outperforms baselines, improving Last accuracy by +12.0% over the vanilla RLVR baseline.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Continual Learning for VLMs: A Survey and Taxonomy Beyond Forgetting

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. However, enabling them to learn continually from non-stationary data remains a major challenge, as their cross-modal alignment and generalization capabilities are particularly vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting. Unlike traditional unimodal continual learning (CL), VLMs face unique challenges such as cross-modal feature drift, parameter interference due to shared architectures, and zero-shot capability erosion. Furthermore, generative MLLMs exhibit a unique "alignment tax," where catastrophic forgetting manifests not merely as factual amnesia, but as a systemic collapse of deep Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. This survey presents the first comprehensive diagnostic review bridging continual learning across predictive VLMs and generative MLLMs. We systematically deconstruct the aforementioned failure modes and propose a challenge-driven taxonomy comprising four core paradigms: (1) Multi-Modal Replay Strategies addressing explicit and implicit memory drift; (2) Cross-Modal Regularization enforcing topological and geometric alignment; (3) Parameter-Efficient Adaptation utilizing dynamic routing and subspace projections; and the emerging (4) Model Fusion and Decoupling paradigms. We critically analyze the evolution of evaluation protocols, highlighting the essential shift toward dual-track benchmarks (Domain vs. Ability CL). Finally, we chart a roadmap for future research, emphasizing compositional zero-shot learning, embodied AI with sensor fusion, and autonomous agentic ecosystems. All resources are available at: https://github.com/YuyangSunshine/Awesome-Continual-learning-of-Vision-Language-Models

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

GNSP: Gradient Null Space Projection for Preserving Cross-Modal Alignment in VLMs Continual Learning

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization by aligning visual and textual modalities in a shared embedding space. However, when continuously fine-tuned on diverse tasks, CLIP suffers from catastrophic forgetting and degradation of its embedding alignment, undermining its zero-shot capabilities. In this work, we propose Gradient Null Space Projection (GNSP), an efficient continual learning method that projects task-specific gradients onto the null space of previously learned knowledge. This orthogonal projection mathematically prevents interference with previous tasks without relying on rehearsal or architectural modification. Furthermore, to preserve the inherent generalization property of CLIP, we introduce knowledge distillation and combine it with a modality alignment preservation loss inspired by CLIP pre-training to stabilize the structure of the multimodal embedding space during fine-tuning. On the MTIL benchmark consisting of 11 tasks, our method achieved SOTA performance on both the Average and Last key metrics. More importantly, experiments show that our method successfully maintains the original modality gap and cross-modal retrieval performance of CLIP, confirming its effectiveness in maintaining a robust visual-language space throughout the continual learning process.

cs.LG↗