# CTP: Towards Vision-Language Continual Pretraining via Compatible Momentum Contrast and Topology Preservation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07146 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07146/

## Key facts

- Cited by 29 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 51 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Prompt learning and adaptation of CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/prompt-learning-and-adaptation-of-clip/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 51)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Scaling Up Visual and Vision-Language Representation Learning With Noisy Text Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05918/) (2021)
- [Visual Genome: Connecting Language and Vision Using Crowdsourced Dense Image Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.07332/) (2016)
- [Making the V in VQA Matter: Elevating the Role of Image Understanding in Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00837/) (2016)
- [VQA: Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.00468/) (2015)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [ViLBERT: Pretraining Task-Agnostic Visiolinguistic Representations for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.02265/) (2019)
- [Fine-Grained Visual Classification of Aircraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.5151/) (2013)
- [Align before Fuse: Vision and Language Representation Learning with Momentum Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.07651/) (2021)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Conceptual 12M: Pushing Web-Scale Image-Text Pre-Training To Recognize Long-Tail Visual Concepts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08981/) (2021)
- [Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06165/) (2020)
- [Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09601/) (2017)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [PackNet: Adding Multiple Tasks to a Single Network by Iterative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05769/) (2017)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [Large Scale Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13260/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Forgery-aware Adaptive Transformer for Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16649/) (2023)
- [Lifelong Learning of Large Language Model based Agents: A Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.07278/) (2025)
- [Continual Instruction Tuning for Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16206/) (2023)
- [Recent Advances of Foundation Language Models-based Continual Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18653/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances of Multimodal Continual Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05352/) (2024)
- [Beyond Anti-Forgetting: Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning with Positive Forward Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09181/) (2024)
- [SFC: Shared Feature Calibration in Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11719/) (2024)
- [CoinSeg: Contrast Inter- and Intra- Class Representations for Incremental Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06368/) (2023)
- [Continual Learning for VLMs: A Survey and Taxonomy Beyond Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.04227/) (2025)
- [The Future of Continual Learning in the Era of Foundation Models: Three Key Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03320/) (2025)
- [Frozen CLIP: A Strong Backbone for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11189/) (2024)
- [LLMs Can Evolve Continually on Modality for X-Modal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20178/) (2024)
- [Background Adaptation with Residual Modeling for Exemplar-Free Class-Incremental Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09838/) (2024)
- [Continual Retinal Vision-Language Pre-training upon Incremental Imaging Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.19320/) (2025)
- [Affordance-First Decomposition for Continual Learning in Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00694/) (2025)
- [SeeClear: Semantic Distillation Enhances Pixel Condensation for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05799/) (2024)
- [Harmony: A Unified Framework for Modality Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13218/) (2025)
- [Semantic Lens: Instance-Centric Semantic Alignment for Video Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07823/) (2023)
- [Prompt Customization for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18060/) (2024)
- [Distribution-Level Memory Recall for Continual Learning: Preserving Knowledge and Avoiding Confusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02695/) (2024)
- [EFSA: Episodic Few-Shot Adaptation for Text-to-Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00139/) (2024)
- [Unsupervised Region-Based Image Editing of Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12912/) (2024)
- [Attention-Spectrum Regularization for Replay-Free Continual Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.23063/) (2026)
- [Hidden Forgetting in Continual Multimodal Learning: When Accuracy Survives but Grounding Fails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02020/) (2026)
- [Continual Contrastive Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02699/) (2023)
- [Second Place Solution of WSDM2023 Toloka Visual Question Answering Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04255/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Feature-Logits Contrastive Learning for Open-Set Semi-Supervised Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13001/) (2024)
- [AMR-CCR: Anchored Modular Retrieval for Continual Chinese Character Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07497/) (2026)
- [Lifelong Representations: A Survey on Continual Self-Supervised Learning for Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09785/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) has shown impressive results on diverse downstream tasks by offline training on large-scale datasets. Regarding the growing nature of real-world data, such an offline training paradigm on ever-expanding data is unsustainable, because models lack the continual learning ability to accumulate knowledge constantly. However, most continual learning studies are limited to uni-modal classification and existing multi-modal datasets cannot simulate continual non-stationary data stream scenarios. To support the study of Vision-Language Continual Pretraining (VLCP), we first contribute a comprehensive and unified benchmark dataset P9D which contains over one million product image-text pairs from 9 industries. The data from each industry as an independent task supports continual learning and conforms to the real-world long-tail nature to simulate pretraining on web data. We comprehensively study the characteristics and challenges of VLCP, and propose a new algorithm: Compatible momentum contrast with Topology Preservation, dubbed CTP. The compatible momentum model absorbs the knowledge of the current and previous-task models to flexibly update the modal feature. Moreover, Topology Preservation transfers the knowledge of embedding across tasks while preserving the flexibility of feature adjustment. The experimental results demonstrate our method not only achieves superior performance compared with other baselines but also does not bring an expensive training burden. Dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/KevinLight831/CTP.