Attention-Spectrum Regularization for Replay-Free Continual Multimodal LLMsChuangxin Zhao, Canran Xiao, Siyuan Ma et al.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly required to adapt to non-stationary streams of visual domains, question types, and user instructions, yet continual fine-tuning often causes severe forgetting of previously acquired multimodal skills. Existing continual vision-language methods mainly preserve outputs, replay data or pseudo-data, regularize embedding geometry, or allocate task-specific parameters, but they provide limited control over how internal cross-modal attention patterns supporting old skills drift during adaptation. We propose Attention-Spectrum Regularization (ASR), a replay-free continual learning framework that preserves skill-conditioned structures of cross-modal attention. ASR treats cross-attention maps as two-dimensional signals, summarizes their scale and directional properties into compact spectral statistics, and stores only skill-wise prototype distributions instead of replaying past image-question pairs, generated pseudo-examples, or old-stage teacher snapshots. In later stages, a phase-invariant spectral regularizer constrains harmful drift of these prototypes while allowing instance-level attention to adapt to new tasks. We provide theoretical analysis showing that skill-conditioned spectral drift controls forgetting under a spectral sufficiency assumption, and that Fourier power spectra are stable to spatial translations and bounded perturbations. Experiments on continual VQA and multimodal instruction-tuning benchmarks, including VQA v2, VQACL, CLT-VQA, CoIN, and UCIT, show that ASR consistently improves final performance and reduces forgetting over strong replay-, regularization-, and adapter-based baselines. Preserving skill-level attention structure is an effective and lightweight mechanism for continual MLLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/Creative-zcx/attention-spectrum-replay
13.1SEJun 19Code
ATLAS: Agentic Taxonomy of Large-Scale Software EcosystemsJunyi Lu, Mengyao Lyu, Jiahui Wu et al.
The open-source ecosystem on GitHub lacks a systematic hierarchical taxonomy of software repositories. GitHub Topics, the dominant organizational mechanism, is flat, inconsistent, and covers only 67% of projects. We present ATLAS, the first framework that automatically constructs a hierarchical taxonomy for software repositories and classifies projects into it end-to-end. By combining LLM global knowledge with real repository distributions, ATLAS proposes meaningful splitting dimensions and iteratively corrects those that fail to accommodate real projects. A Designer Agent proposes splitting dimensions while a Classifier Agent assigns repositories; a self-corrective refinement loop uses classification failures to drive dimension revision through escalating strategies. We evaluate ATLAS on 54,387 GitHub repositories against six baselines spanning four paradigms, two downstream tasks, and three model families. On a stratified 2,001-repository benchmark, ATLAS achieves a Taxonomy Quality F-score (TQF) of 83.13%, outperforming the best baseline by 15 percentage points (on the full 54k corpus the approximate TQF is 73.0%, a gap driven by Path Granularity's all-or-nothing scoring on longer paths rather than lower classification accuracy). It is the only method to simultaneously achieve high structural quality and high practical applicability. On downstream tasks, ATLAS enables alternative discovery with P@1 = 85.71%, surpassing even human-curated lists (62.34%), and achieves the highest P@1 for repository retrieval. The taxonomy further reveals structural ecosystem trends that are difficult to obtain from flat tags or similarity methods: the shift from libraries to AI/ML applications (now 61% of newly community-adopted projects) becomes visible only through hierarchical, type-based categorization. An interactive taxonomy explorer is available at https://atlas-taxonomy.netlify.app/