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This paper explores the problem of continual learning (CL) of vision-language models (VLMs) in open domains, where the models need to perform continual updating and inference on a streaming of datasets from diverse seen and unseen domains with novel classes. Such a capability is crucial for various applications in open environments, e.g., AI assistants, autonomous driving systems, and robotics. Current CL studies mostly focus on closed-set scenarios in a single domain with known classes. Large pre-trained VLMs like CLIP have demonstrated superior zero-shot recognition ability, and a number of recent studies leverage this ability to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in CL, but they focus on closed-set CL in a single domain dataset. Open-domain CL of large VLMs is significantly more challenging due to 1) large class correlations and domain gaps across the datasets and 2) the forgetting of zero-shot knowledge in the pre-trained VLMs in addition to the knowledge learned from the newly adapted datasets. In this work we introduce a novel approach, termed CoLeCLIP, that learns an open-domain CL model based on CLIP. It addresses these challenges by a joint learning of a set of task prompts and a cross-domain class vocabulary. Extensive experiments on 11 domain datasets show that CoLeCLIP outperforms state-of-the-art methods for open-domain CL under both task- and class-incremental learning settings.

Multi-task visual perception has a wide range of applications in scene understanding such as autonomous driving. In this work, we devise an efficient unified framework to solve multiple common perception tasks, including instance segmentation, semantic segmentation, monocular 3D detection, and depth estimation. Simply sharing the same visual feature representations for these tasks impairs the performance of tasks, while independent task-specific feature extractors lead to parameter redundancy and latency. Thus, we design two feature-merge branches to learn feature basis, which can be useful to, and thus shared by, multiple perception tasks. Then, each task takes the corresponding feature basis as the input of the prediction task head to fulfill a specific task. In particular, one feature merge branch is designed for instance-level recognition the other for dense predictions. To enhance inter-branch communication, the instance branch passes pixel-wise spatial information of each instance to the dense branch using efficient dynamic convolution weighting. Moreover, a simple but effective dynamic routing mechanism is proposed to isolate task-specific features and leverage common properties among tasks. Our proposed framework, termed D2BNet, demonstrates a unique approach to parameter-efficient predictions for multi-task perception. In addition, as tasks benefit from co-training with each other, our solution achieves on par results on partially labeled settings on nuScenes and outperforms previous works for 3D detection and depth estimation on the Cityscapes dataset with full supervision., Comment: Accepted by International Journal of Computer Vision. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2011.09796