Infusing fine-grained visual knowledge to Vision-Language Models
This addresses the challenge of adapting large-scale VLMs for specialized tasks like fine-grained retrieval without losing their broad multimodal knowledge, which is incremental as it builds on existing continual learning techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of catastrophic forgetting in fine-tuning Vision-Language Models for fine-grained visual retrieval, proposing a method that balances domain adaptation with retention of general-purpose capabilities, achieving strong results on retrieval benchmarks without using text data during fine-tuning.
Large-scale contrastive pre-training produces powerful Vision-and-Language Models (VLMs) capable of generating representations (embeddings) effective for a wide variety of visual and multimodal tasks. However, these pretrained embeddings remain suboptimal for fine-grained open-set visual retrieval, where state-of-the-art results require fine-tuning the vision encoder using annotated domain-specific samples. Naively performing such fine-tuning typically leads to catastrophic forgetting, severely diminishing the model's general-purpose visual and cross-modal capabilities. In this work, we propose a fine-tuning method explicitly designed to achieve optimal balance between fine-grained domain adaptation and retention of the pretrained VLM's broad multimodal knowledge. Drawing inspiration from continual learning literature, we systematically analyze standard regularization techniques aimed at knowledge retention and propose an efficient and effective combination strategy. Additionally, we address the commonly overlooked yet critical aspects of validation set design and hyperparameter tuning to ensure reproducibility and robust generalization across datasets and pretrained models. We extensively evaluate our method on both fine-grained and coarse-grained image-image and image-text retrieval benchmarks. Our approach consistently achieves strong results, notably retaining the visual-text alignment without utilizing any text data or the original text encoder during fine-tuning. Code and model checkpoints: https://github.com/nikosips/infusing .