提出两种简单方法,让多模态大模型学新技能不遗忘旧知识。
How to Teach Large Multimodal Models New Skills
- 只更新注意力投影层或MLP门控层,减少参数改动
- 新技能学习能力提升24.9~30.5分,遗忘仅0.6~2.1分
- 适用于多种模型,无需额外参数或复杂训练流程
如何在不破坏已有能力的前提下教会大型多模态模型(LMMs)新技能?我们对五项目标技能进行顺序微调,并在三个模型家族的八个保留基准上监测通用能力。令人意外的是,模型在某一技能微调后损失的表现,可在后续微调另一技能时部分恢复。我们发现这种现象源于输出词元分布的可测量变化,通过计数偏差探针可观察到该变化与遗忘程度相关。基于此,我们提出两种简单且稳健的微调策略:(i) 仅更新自注意力投影层(SA Proj.),学习提升+24.9,保留任务遗忘-0.6;(ii) 仅更新MLP Gate&Up,冻结Down投影层,学习提升+30.5,遗忘-2.1。两者显著优于全模型微调(+31.8 / -23.3)。对比常见缓解遗忘的方法(如LwF、LoRA、MoE、WiSE-FT),我们的方法在学习-稳定平衡上表现相当或更优,且更简单,无需回放、辅助参数或逐阶段训练。结果在LLaVA-OneVision、LLaVA-NeXT和Qwen2.5-VL中均成立,证明控制输出分布偏移是避免遗忘的关键。代码将开源。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model families. Surprisingly, we find that performance lost on held-out tasks after fine-tuning on one skill can partly recover when the model is subsequently tuned on a different skill. We trace this behavior to a measurable shift in the output token distribution, manifested through a simple counting-bias probe that shows the shift co-varies with forgetting. Guided by this insight, we identify two simple, robust tuning recipes that learn strongly while limiting drift: (i) updating only the self-attention projection layers (SA Proj., $Δ$ learning +24.9 / $Δ$ held-out forgetting -0.6), and (ii) updating only the MLP Gate&Up while freezing the Down projection (+30.5 / -2.1). Both substantially outperform full-LLM tuning (+31.8 / -23.3) in the learning-forgetting trade-off. We also compare against common forgetting mitigation methods: Learning without Forgetting (LwF), LoRA, Mixture-of-Experts, and weight-space interpolation (WiSE-FT), and find that our selective tuning recipes match or exceed their learning-stability balance while remaining simpler, requiring no replay, auxiliary parameters, or per-stage tuning. These results hold across LLaVA-OneVision, LLaVA-NeXT, and Qwen2.5-VL, confirming that the key to teaching LMMs new skills without forgetting lies in controlling output distribution shift by choosing which components to tune. Code will be made available.
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