Multi-Modal Continual Learning via Cross-Modality Adapters and Representation Alignment with Knowledge Preservation

Abstract: Continual learning is essential for adapting models to new tasks while retaining previously acquired knowledge. While existing approaches predominantly focus on uni-modal data, multi-modal learning offers substantial benefits by utilizing diverse sensory inputs, akin to human perception. However, multi-modal continual learning presents additional challenges, as the model must effectively integrate new information from various modalities while preventing catastrophic forgetting. In this work, we propose a pre-trained model-based framework for multi-modal continual learning. Our framework includes a novel cross-modality adapter with a mixture-of-experts structure to facilitate effective integration of multi-modal information across tasks. We also introduce a representation alignment loss that fosters learning of robust multi-modal representations, and regularize relationships between learned representations to preserve knowledge from previous tasks. Experiments on several multi-modal datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms baselines in both class-incremental and domain-incremental learning, achieving higher accuracy and reduced forgetting.