Generalizing Multimodal Foundational Models in Context-Driven Class Incremental Learning

Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn new classes continuously without forgetting the previously learned ones. Recent works in CIL have significantly advanced across various modalities; however, at the intersection of audio-visual modality, this problem remains underexplored. While representations from multimodal foundational models (MFMs) encapsulate rich static priors, our preliminary analysis shows that these representations struggle in incremental settings. Motivated by this, we propose a framework that generalizes frozen MFMs to audio-visual CIL. Specifically, we leverage their dense audio and visual representations and employ an attention-based contextual guidance module, in which the audio representations serve as task-stable contextual guidance for the visual representations, enabling effective class recognition in the incremental setting. To further mitigate catastrophic forgetting and preserve stability across tasks, we employ feature- and logit-level distillation, which are primarily responsible for the reduced forgetting. Extensive evaluations across various audio-visual CIL benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/avigupta2798/MFM-CIL.