# Memory-Efficient Continual Learning with CLIP Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03866 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03866/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Reproducible scaling laws for contrastive language-image learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07143/) (2022)
- [Co2L: Contrastive Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14413/) (2021)
- [FOSTER: Feature Boosting and Compression for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04662/) (2022)
- [A Model or 603 Exemplars: Towards Memory-Efficient Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13218/) (2022)
- [Finetune like you pretrain: Improved finetuning of zero-shot vision models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00638/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Models are Continual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04215/) (2021)
- [CLIP model is an Efficient Continual Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03114/) (2022)
- [Provable Stochastic Optimization for Global Contrastive Learning: Small Batch Does Not Harm Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12387/) (2022)
- [When AUC meets DRO: Optimizing Partial AUC for Deep Learning with Non-Convex Convergence Guarantee](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00176/) (2022)
- [Multimodal Pretraining of Medical Time Series and Notes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06855/) (2023)
- [Contrastive Continual Learning with Importance Sampling and Prototype-Instance Relation Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04599/) (2024)
- [Generalized Few-Shot Continual Learning with Contrastive Mixture of Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05936/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models excel at understanding image-text relationships but struggle with adapting to new data without forgetting prior knowledge. To address this, models are typically fine-tuned using both new task data and a memory buffer of past tasks. However, CLIP's contrastive loss suffers when the memory buffer is small, leading to performance degradation on previous tasks. We propose a memory-efficient, distributionally robust method that dynamically reweights losses per class during training. Our approach, tested on class incremental settings (CIFAR-100, ImageNet1K) and a domain incremental setting (DomainNet) adapts CLIP models quickly while minimizing catastrophic forgetting, even with minimal memory usage.