DesCLIP: Robust Continual Learning via General Attribute Descriptions for VLM-Based Visual Recognition

Abstract

Continual learning of vision-language models (VLMs) focuses on leveraging cross-modal pretrained knowledge to incrementally adapt to expanding downstream tasks and datasets, while tackling the challenge of knowledge forgetting. Existing research often focuses on connecting visual features with specific class text in downstream tasks, overlooking the latent relationships between general and specialized knowledge. Our findings reveal that forcing models to optimize inappropriate visual-text matches exacerbates forgetting of VLM's recognition ability. To tackle this issue, we propose DesCLIP, which leverages general attribute (GA) descriptions to guide the understanding of specific class objects, enabling VLMs to establish robust vision-GA-class trilateral associations rather than relying solely on vision-class connections. Specifically, we introduce a language assistant to generate concrete GA description candidates via proper request prompts. Then, an anchor-based embedding filter is designed to obtain highly relevant GA description embeddings, which are leveraged as the paired text embeddings for visual-textual instance matching, thereby tuning the visual encoder. Correspondingly, the class text embeddings are gradually calibrated to align with these shared GA description embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advancements and efficacy of our proposed method, with comprehensive empirical evaluations highlighting its superior performance in VLM-based recognition compared to existing continual learning methods.