提出TRACER方法,解决多模态微调时的灾难性遗忘问题。
TRACER: Persistent Regularization for Robust Multimodal Finetuning

- 用加权移动平均教师保持持续正则化力
- 在三种主干网络上实现稳定且更优的分布外准确率
- 适合需要鲁棒微调的多模态模型开发者
主流多模态预训练模型微调策略常导致分布外(OOD)鲁棒性下降,即灾难性遗忘。本文建立了多模态对比微调的理论框架,推导出闭式解与几何分解,揭示自蒸馏比其他正则化方法更有效保留预训练知识。分析发现,广泛使用的指数移动平均(EMA)教师存在崩溃问题。为此,证明加权移动平均(WMA)教师能在有限时间窗内维持持续正则化力,实现任务子空间无偏收敛并保持正交知识。基于此,提出TRACER(Trajectory-Robust Anchoring for Contrastive Encoder Regularization),结合对比学习与WMA引导的多视角蒸馏。在CLIP微调上的大量实验表明,三种主干架构均获得一致的分布外准确率与校准性能提升,全面消融实验验证了TRACER的理论严谨性与对超参数选择的鲁棒性。代码已公开于https://github.com/HesamAsad/TRACER。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Mainstream strategies for finetuning pretrained multimodal models often degrade out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for multimodal contrastive finetuning, yielding closed-form solutions and a geometric decomposition for each strategy. This framework shows that self-distillation is more effective than other regularization approaches to retain the knowledge of the pretrained model. Our analysis reveals a largely overlooked limitation: standard Exponential Moving Average (EMA) teachers, widely used in robust finetuning, suffer from collapse. To solve this, we prove that a Weighted Moving Average (WMA) teacher maintains a persistent regularizing force over finite horizons and yields bias-free convergence in the task subspace while preserving orthogonal knowledge. These insights motivate **TRACER** (**T**rajectory-**R**obust **A**nchoring for **C**ontrastive **E**ncoder **R**egularization), which combines contrastive learning with WMA-guided multi-perspective distillation. Extensive experiments on CLIP finetuning demonstrate consistent OOD accuracy and calibration gains across three backbone architectures, and comprehensive ablations confirm that TRACER is both principled and robust to hyperparameter choices. Code is available at [https://github.com/HesamAsad/TRACER](https://github.com/HesamAsad/TRACER).
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