CluMo: Cluster-based Modality Fusion Prompt for Continual Learning in Visual Question Answering

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown significant performance boost in various application domains. However, adopting them to deal with several sequentially encountered tasks has been challenging because finetuning a VLM on a task normally leads to reducing its generalization power and the capacity of learning new tasks as well as causing catastrophic forgetting on previously learned tasks. Enabling using VLMs in multimodal continual learning (CL) settings can help to address such scenarios. To improve generalization capacity and prevent catastrophic forgetting, we propose a novel prompt-based CL method for VLMs, namely $\textbf{Clu}$ster-based $\textbf{Mo}$dality Fusion Prompt (\textbf{CluMo}). We design a novel \textbf{Key-Key-Prompt} pair, where each prompt is associated with a visual prompt key and a textual prompt key. We adopt a two-stage training strategy. During the first stage, the single-modal keys are trained via $K$-means clustering algorithm to help select the best semantically matched prompt. During the second stage, the prompt keys are frozen, the selected prompt is attached to the input for training the VLM in the CL scenario. Experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA performance.

Enhancing Bandwidth Efficiency for Video Motion Transfer Applications using Deep Learning Based Keypoint Prediction

We propose a deep learning based novel prediction framework for enhanced bandwidth reduction in motion transfer enabled video applications such as video conferencing, virtual reality gaming and privacy preservation for patient health monitoring. To model complex motion, we use the First Order Motion Model (FOMM) that represents dynamic objects using learned keypoints along with their local affine transformations. Keypoints are extracted by a self-supervised keypoint detector and organized in a time series corresponding to the video frames. Prediction of keypoints, to enable transmission using lower frames per second on the source device, is performed using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network (VRNN). The predicted keypoints are then synthesized to video frames using an optical flow estimator and a generator network. This efficacy of leveraging keypoint based representations in conjunction with VRNN based prediction for both video animation and reconstruction is demonstrated on three diverse datasets. For real-time applications, our results show the effectiveness of our proposed architecture by enabling up to 2x additional bandwidth reduction over existing keypoint based video motion transfer frameworks without significantly compromising video quality.

Dynamic Transformer Architecture for Continual Learning of Multimodal Tasks

Transformer neural networks are increasingly replacing prior architectures in a wide range of applications in different data modalities. The increasing size and computational demands of fine-tuning large pre-trained transformer neural networks pose significant challenges for the widespread adoption of these models for applications that demand on-edge computing. To tackle this challenge, continual learning (CL) emerges as a solution by facilitating the transfer of knowledge across tasks that arrive sequentially for an autonomously learning agent. However, current CL methods mainly focus on learning tasks that are exclusively vision-based or language-based. We propose a transformer-based CL framework focusing on learning tasks that involve both vision and language, known as Vision-and-Language (VaL) tasks. Due to the success of transformers in other modalities, our architecture has the potential to be used in multimodal learning settings. In our framework, we benefit from introducing extra parameters to a base transformer to specialize the network for each task. As a result, we enable dynamic model expansion to learn several tasks in a sequence. We also use knowledge distillation to benefit from relevant past experiences to learn the current task more efficiently. Our proposed method, Task Attentive Multimodal Continual Learning (TAM-CL), allows for the exchange of information between tasks while mitigating the problem of catastrophic forgetting. Notably, our approach is scalable, incurring minimal memory and time overhead. TAM-CL achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on challenging multimodal tasks

Task-Attentive Transformer Architecture for Continual Learning of Vision-and-Language Tasks Using Knowledge Distillation

The size and the computational load of fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained neural network are becoming two major obstacles in adopting machine learning in many applications. Continual learning (CL) can serve as a remedy through enabling knowledge-transfer across sequentially arriving tasks which relaxes the need to fine-tune all network weights from scratch. However, existing CL algorithms primarily consider learning unimodal vision-only or language-only tasks. We develop a transformer-based CL architecture for learning bimodal vision-and-language tasks based on increasing the number of the learnable parameters dynamically and using knowledge distillation. The new additional parameters are used to specialize the network for each task. Our approach enables sharing information between the tasks while addressing the challenge of catastrophic forgetting. Our approach is scalable learning to a large number of tasks because it requires little memory and time overhead. Our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on challenging vision-and-language tasks.