Spectral Imbalance Causes Forgetting in Low-Rank Continual Adaptation

Parameter-efficient continual learning aims to adapt pre-trained models to sequential tasks without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Most existing approaches treat continual learning as avoiding interference with past updates, rather than considering what properties make the current task-specific update naturally preserve previously acquired knowledge. From a knowledge-decomposition perspective, we observe that low-rank adaptations exhibit highly imbalanced singular value spectra: a few dominant components absorb most of the adaptation energy, thereby (i) more likely to disrupt previously acquired knowledge and (ii) making the update more vulnerable to interference from subsequent tasks. To enable explicit balance among components, we decouple the magnitude of the task update from its directional structure and formulate it as a constrained optimization problem on a restricted Stiefel manifold. We address this problem using a projected first-order method compatible with standard deep-learning optimizers used in vision-language models. Our method mitigates both backward and forward forgetting, consistently outperforming continual learning baselines. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/haodotgu/EBLoRA.

KeepLoRA: Continual Learning with Residual Gradient Adaptation

Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents a simple but effective approach called KeepLoRA to effectively balance these objectives. We first analyze the knowledge retention mechanism within the model parameter space and find that general knowledge is mainly encoded in the principal subspace, while task-specific knowledge is encoded in the residual subspace. Motivated by this finding, KeepLoRA learns new tasks by restricting LoRA parameter updates in the residual subspace to prevent interfering with previously learned capabilities. Specifically, we infuse knowledge for a new task by projecting its gradient onto a subspace orthogonal to both the principal subspace of pre-trained model and the dominant directions of previous task features. Our theoretical and empirical analyses confirm that KeepLoRA balances the three objectives and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/MaolinLuo/KeepLoRA.

LADA: Scalable Label-Specific CLIP Adapter for Continual Learning

Continual learning with vision-language models like CLIP offers a pathway toward scalable machine learning systems by leveraging its transferable representations. Existing CLIP-based methods adapt the pre-trained image encoder by adding multiple sets of learnable parameters, with each task using a partial set of parameters. This requires selecting the expected parameters for input images during inference, which is prone to error that degrades performance. To address this problem, we introduce LADA (Label-specific ADApter). Instead of partitioning parameters across tasks, LADA appends lightweight, label-specific memory units to the frozen CLIP image encoder, enabling discriminative feature generation by aggregating task-agnostic knowledge. To prevent catastrophic forgetting, LADA employs feature distillation for seen classes, preventing their features from being interfered with by new classes. Positioned after the image encoder, LADA prevents gradient flow to the frozen CLIP parameters, ensuring efficient training. Extensive results show that LADA achieves state-of-the-art performance in continual learning settings. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/MaolinLuo/LADA.