Enhancing Continual Learning in Visual Question Answering with Modality-Aware Feature Distillation

Malvina Nikandrou, Georgios Pantazopoulos, Ioannis Konstas, Alessandro Suglia


Abstract
Continual learning focuses on incrementally training a model on a sequence of tasks with the aim of learning new tasks while minimizing performance drop on previous tasks. Existing approaches at the intersection of Continual Learning and Visual Question Answering (VQA) do not study how the multimodal nature of the input affects the learning dynamics of a model. In this paper, we demonstrate that each modality evolves at different rates across a continuum of tasks and that this behavior occurs in established encoder-only models as well as modern recipes for developing Vision & Language (VL) models. Motivated by this observation, we propose a modality-aware feature distillation (MAFED) approach which outperforms existing baselines across models of varying scale in three multimodal continual learning settings. Furthermore, we provide ablations showcasing that modality-aware distillation complements experience replay. Overall, our results emphasize the importance of addressing modality-specific dynamics to prevent forgetting in multimodal continual learning.
Anthology ID:
2024.alvr-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Jing Gu, Tsu-Jui (Ray) Fu, Drew Hudson, Asli Celikyilmaz, William Wang
Venues:
ALVR | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
73–85
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.alvr-1.6
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.alvr-1.6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Malvina Nikandrou, Georgios Pantazopoulos, Ioannis Konstas, and Alessandro Suglia. 2024. Enhancing Continual Learning in Visual Question Answering with Modality-Aware Feature Distillation. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR), pages 73–85, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Continual Learning in Visual Question Answering with Modality-Aware Feature Distillation (Nikandrou et al., ALVR-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.alvr-1.6.pdf