CRAM: Centroid-Routing and Adaptive MoE for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning
CRAM is a new method for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) that addresses the tension between catastrophic forgetting and parameter efficiency in MLLMs. It combines adaptive-rank instantiation to dynamically allocate parameters based on capability gaps, centroid-guided routing to reuse existing expert knowledge, and an orthogonality penalty to confine new updates to task-specific directions. The approach uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture where task-specific patterns are isolated into independent modules, avoiding both the interference of shared updates and the parameter bloat of fully isolated expansion. Experiments across diverse benchmarks show consistent improvements over existing MCIT methods.
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ProtoAda: Prototype-Guided Adaptive Adapter Expansion for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning
ProtoAda is a new framework for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) that addresses a key failure mode in sparse Mixture-of-LoRA-Experts architectures: image-text similarity routing is format-blind and incorrectly merges tasks with similar semantics but different output structures (e.g., coordinate prediction vs. VQA). The method introduces format-aware task prototypes to guide both routing and adapter expansion, then consolidates compatible updates geometrically to reuse and refine existing parameters. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show improved performance, particularly on tasks whose answer formats are vulnerable to corruption by sequential fine-tuning.
Prism: Plug-in Infrastructure for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning Research
Prism is an open-source codebase designed to address engineering bottlenecks in Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT) research. It introduces a plugin registration mechanism that separates algorithmic development from backbone MLLM implementation, allowing new continual learning strategies to be integrated without modifying the underlying model codebase. This design aims to eliminate structural fragmentation across method-specific implementations and enable fair, reproducible comparisons at scale.
AMARIS: Memory-Augmented Rubric Improvement System for Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning
AMARIS introduces a persistent evaluation memory system to improve rubric-based reward shaping in LLM fine-tuning via reinforcement learning. Unlike prior adaptive rubric methods that discard evaluation diagnostics after each step, AMARIS accumulates step-level summaries and retrieves relevant historical context via both static (recent steps) and dynamic (semantic similarity) retrieval to inform rubric updates. The system runs asynchronously alongside the RL training loop with approximately 5% time overhead. Experiments across closed and open-ended domains show consistent improvements over baselines, with ablations confirming that combining both retrieval modes yields the strongest results.
MAGIC: Multimodal Alignment & Grounding-aware Instruction Coreset for Vision-Language Models
MAGIC is a training-free coreset selection method for multimodal instruction tuning that uses three intrinsic signals—Multimodal Gain, Bridging Relevance, and Skill-Neuron Signatures—to identify compact, behaviorally faithful training subsets without backpropagation. The method operates in a three-stage pipeline: filtering low-gain examples, ranking by a quality objective, and bucket-wise budget allocation over neuron signatures. On LLaVA-665K and Vision-Flan datasets with 20% data budgets, MAGIC matches or slightly exceeds full fine-tuning performance (100.3% and 101.6% relative) while reducing wall-clock training time by 73.7%. Results transfer to LLaVA-1.5-7B and -13B target models.
Expert Tying reduces MoE LLM memory footprint by ~2x with minimal quality loss
Researchers introduce Expert Tying, an architectural modification for Mixture-of-Experts LLMs that shares expert parameters across consecutive transformer layers while keeping routing and attention layer-independent. Evaluated on OLMoE, Qwen3, and DeepSeek-style MoE architectures, the method achieves nearly 2x memory reduction with negligible perplexity or downstream quality degradation. The approach exploits parameter redundancy in MoE pathways to improve the compute-to-memory trade-off for training and inference.
Global-batch Load Balancing for MoE LLM Training from Qwen
Qwen Research introduces a global-batch load balancing technique for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) LLM training, claiming it is nearly a 'free lunch' improvement. The method addresses expert load imbalance across training batches, a known efficiency and quality bottleneck in MoE architectures. The approach targets the router and expert activation dynamics in transformer-based MoE layers.
LongMINT: Benchmark for Evaluating Memory Under Multi-Target Interference in Long-Horizon Agent Systems
LongMINT is a new benchmark designed to evaluate memory-augmented agents in realistic long-horizon settings where information is repeatedly updated and interferes across memories. It contains 15.6k QA pairs over contexts averaging 138.8k tokens (up to 1.8M tokens), spanning domains including state tracking, multi-turn dialogue, Wikipedia revisions, and GitHub commits. Evaluation of 7 representative systems—including vanilla long-context LLMs, RAG, and memory-augmented agent frameworks—reveals consistently low average accuracy of 27.9%, with performance particularly degraded on multi-target aggregation tasks and when earlier facts are revised by subsequent context. The analysis identifies retrieval and memory construction as the primary bottlenecks.
SETA: Sparse Subspace-to-Expert Sharing for Continual Learning in LLMs
Researchers introduce SETA (Mixture of Sparse Experts for Task Agnostic Continual Learning), a framework addressing catastrophic forgetting in LLMs via adaptive sparse subspace decomposition into task-specific and shared expert modules. The approach uses adaptive elastic anchoring and routing-aware regularization to protect shared knowledge at both weight and routing levels. Experiments on LLaMA-2 7B and Qwen3-4B show competitive or superior performance versus continual learning baselines, with strong retention of early-task knowledge.