Paper Detail

AlphaWiSE: Adaptive Weight Interpolation for Continual Multimodal Representation Learning

Sarthak Jain, Qiran Hu, Zhen Zhu, Yaoyao Liu

arxiv Score 15.2

Published 2026-07-16 · First seen 2026-07-17

General AI

Abstract

Multimodal models such as CLIP learn a shared embedding space for cross-modal retrieval, but continual adaptation to sequentially arriving data can disrupt the cross-modal alignment acquired from earlier phases. Conventional continual-learning methods return a single checkpoint, which commits every retrieval direction to the same stability-plasticity trade-off. We propose AlphaWiSE, a post-hoc weight-space interpolation method that composes two frozen source checkpoints. For each aligned parameter tensor identified by its checkpoint key, AlphaWiSE fits one scalar interpolation coefficient shared by all tensor entries. The coefficients are fitted on a smaller exemplar memory and used to materialize one interpolated checkpoint. The deployed model has the same architecture and parameter count as either source checkpoint, which does not require additional inference time. Extensive experiments on audio-image-text retrieval show consistent improvements over strong continual-learning baselines across multiple retrieval directions and evaluation metrics.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{jain2026alphawise,
  title = {AlphaWiSE: Adaptive Weight Interpolation for Continual Multimodal Representation Learning},
  author = {Sarthak Jain and Qiran Hu and Zhen Zhu and Yaoyao Liu},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Multimodal models such as CLIP learn a shared embedding space for cross-modal retrieval, but continual adaptation to sequentially arriving data can disrupt the cross-modal alignment acquired from earlier phases. Conventional continual-learning methods return a single checkpoint, which commits every retrieval direction to the same stability-plasticity trade-off. We propose AlphaWiSE, a post-hoc weight-space interpolation method that composes two frozen source checkpoints. For each aligned paramet},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15094},
  keywords = {cs.CV, cs.LG},
  eprint = {2607.15094},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}