# Dual-Mode Low-Rank Learner with Bridge-Prototype Ensemble for Vision-Language Class-Incremental Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36759 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36759/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [LAION-400M: Open Dataset of CLIP-Filtered 400 Million Image-Text Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.02114/) (2021)
- [CLIP-Adapter: Better Vision-Language Models with Feature Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04544/) (2021)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13218/) (2022)
- [Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14152/) (2023)
- [Boosting Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models via Mixture-of-Experts Adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11549/) (2024)
- [InfLoRA: Interference-Free Low-Rank Adaptation for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00228/) (2024)
- [CLIP model is an Efficient Continual Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03114/) (2022)
- [Class-Incremental Learning with CLIP: Adaptive Representation Adjustment and Parameter Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14143/) (2024)
- [Language Guided Concept Bottleneck Models for Interpretable Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23283/) (2025)
- [Overcoming Generic Knowledge Loss with Selective Parameter Update](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12462/) (2023)
- [KeepLoRA: Continual Learning with Residual Gradient Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19659/) (2026)
- [MINGLE: Mixture of Null-Space Gated Low-Rank Experts for Test-Time Continual Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11883/) (2025)
- [Harnessing Textual Semantic Priors for Knowledge Transfer and Refinement in CLIP-Driven Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01579/) (2025)
- [Null-Space Filtering for Data-Free Continual Model Merging: Preserving Stability, Promoting Plasticity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21413/) (2025)
- [Exploiting the Semantic Knowledge of Pre-trained Text-Encoders for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01076/) (2024)
- [Stabilizing the Modality Gap: Null-Space Projected Continual Learning for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19839/) (2025)
- [Adapter-Enhanced Semantic Prompting for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.11074/) (2024)
- [DesCLIP: Robust Continual Learning via General Attribute Descriptions for VLM-Based Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00618/) (2025)
- [Continual Learning with Vision-Language Models via Semantic-Geometry Preservation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12055/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Benefiting from transferable visual-textual alignment, CLIP has been widely adopted for class-incremental learning (CIL). However, existing learners either repeatedly update components shared across tasks, leading to knowledge overwriting, or overly isolate new-task updates, hindering the reuse of CLIP's transferable knowledge and limiting plasticity. Moreover, the text-based or bimodal classifier designs still fail to effectively integrate complementary information from the visual and textual modalities. To address these challenges, we introduce DuLBE, which couples dual-mode low-rank learning with a bridge-prototype ensemble classifier for exemplar-free CIL. DuLBE allocates two visual low-rank update modes according to the gradient demand and uses gradient routing to coordinate them: a compact and rewritable shared mode is selected from historically occupied visual directions to reuse transferable knowledge, while residual modes provide low-interference channels for task-specific variations. Building on the resulting stable inter-modal structure, we further construct geodesic bridges between visual prototypes and text embeddings on the unit hypersphere, and ensemble reliable bridge prototypes to compensate for the modality-gap limitations of textual decision boundaries. Extensive experiments under multiple settings show that DuLBE achieves state-of-the-art CIL performance while retaining the high parameter efficiency of low-rank tuning.