Clea Rebillard, Julio Hurtado, Andrii Krutsylo, Lucia Passaro, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Continually learn to map visual concepts to language models in resource-constrained environments, Neurocomputing, Volume 652, 2025, 131013, DOI: 10.1016/j.neucom.2025.131013.
Abstract: Continually learning from non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) data poses a significant challenge in deep learning, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Visual models trained via supervised learning often suffer from overfitting, catastrophic forgetting, and biased representations when faced with sequential tasks. In contrast, pre-trained language models demonstrate greater robustness in managing task sequences due to their generalized knowledge representations, albeit at the cost of high computational resources. Leveraging this advantage, we propose a novel learning strategy, Continual Visual Mapping (CVM), which continuously maps visual representations into a fixed knowledge space derived from a language model. By anchoring learning to this fixed space, CVM enables training small, efficient visual models, making it particularly suited for scenarios where adapting large pre-trained visual models is computationally or data-prohibitive. Empirical evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that CVM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods, showcasing its potential to enhance generalization and mitigate challenges in resource-constrained continual learning settings.
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