Paper Detail

Continual Video-MLLM Adaptation over Evolving Domains

Rui Cheng, Meixing Shi, Yuxiang Cai, Jingcai Guo, Jianwei Yin, Zhi Chen

arxiv Score 19.8

Published 2026-07-21 · First seen 2026-07-22

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Video multimodal large language models have shown strong capability in video understanding, yet their adaptation to sequentially evolving domains remains underexplored. In real-world deployments, video data often arrives continuously from heterogeneous domains, requiring the model to acquire new domain-specific knowledge without overwriting previously learned capabilities. Existing continual learning methods typically rely on shared adaptation spaces, which can induce severe cross-domain interference and catastrophic forgetting. We propose Distribution-Aware Expert Routing, a parameter-efficient framework for continual Video-MLLM adaptation over evolving domains. DAER maintains domain-isolated lightweight experts while keeping the pretrained Video-MLLM backbone frozen, thereby decoupling domain-specific adaptation from the general multimodal knowledge of the pretrained model. To enable fine-grained specialization, we introduce an intra-domain distribution-aware routing mechanism that matches each input to expert-level prototype reservoirs using MMD. To address the absence of task identities at inference time, we further propose an inter-domain routing mechanism that performs prototype matching in a discriminative subspace for robust domain identification. In addition, we introduce adaptive domain merging to improve parameter scalability and adopt a two-stage optimization strategy to stabilize expert specialization during continual learning. We evaluate DAER by curating a domain-incremental benchmark built from ten VidQA datasets covering diverse visual environments and reasoning demands. Experiments on two strong Video-MLLM backbones show that DAER consistently outperforms prior methods.

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BibTeX

@article{cheng2026continual,
  title = {Continual Video-MLLM Adaptation over Evolving Domains},
  author = {Rui Cheng and Meixing Shi and Yuxiang Cai and Jingcai Guo and Jianwei Yin and Zhi Chen},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Video multimodal large language models have shown strong capability in video understanding, yet their adaptation to sequentially evolving domains remains underexplored. In real-world deployments, video data often arrives continuously from heterogeneous domains, requiring the model to acquire new domain-specific knowledge without overwriting previously learned capabilities. Existing continual learning methods typically rely on shared adaptation spaces, which can induce severe cross-domain interfe},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18716},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2607.18716},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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