{
  "annotation_id": "60f2445e-8b34-4835-a8f4-3a559ba3d316",
  "date_created": "2026-02-17T05:53:24.277000Z",
  "date_modified": "2026-02-17T05:53:24.277000Z",
  "file_hash": "637e264893682e8600cce1d362426b5e18c51ad5c37578c4a4a32e553c7196dc",
  "private": false,
  "record": {
    "abstract": "Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP often leads to catastrophic forgetting of pretrained knowledge. Prior work primarily aims to mitigate forgetting during adaptation; however, forgetting often remains inevitable during this process. We introduce a novel paradigm, \\emph{continued fine-tuning (CFT)}, which seeks to recover pretrained knowledge after a zero-shot model has already been adapted. We propose a simple, model-agnostic CFT strategy (named MERGETUNE) guided by linear mode connectivity (LMC), which can be applied post hoc to existing fine-tuned models without requiring architectural changes. Given a fine-tuned model, we continue fine-tuning its trainable parameters (e.g., soft prompts or linear heads) to search for a continued model which has two low-loss paths to the zero-shot (e.g., CLIP) and the fine-tuned (e.g., CoOp) solutions. By exploiting the geometry of the loss landscape, the continued model implicitly merges the two solutions, restoring pretrained knowledge lost in the fine-tuned counterpart. A challenge is that the vanilla LMC constraint requires data replay from the pretraining task. We approximate this constraint for the zero-shot model via a second-order surrogate, eliminating the need for large-scale data replay. Experiments show that MERGETUNE improves the harmonic mean of CoOp by +5.6\\% on base-novel generalisation without adding parameters. % We show \\emph{the first time} superior performance than CLIP on both DTD and EuroSAT, on cross-dataset transfer. On robust fine-tuning evaluations, the LMC-merged model from MERGETUNE surpasses ensemble baselines with lower inference cost, achieving further gains and state-of-the-art results when ensembled with the zero-shot model. Our code is available at \\href{https://github.com/Surrey-UP-Lab/MERGETUNE}{https://github.com/Surrey-UP-Lab/MERGETUNE}.",
    "arxiv_id": "2601.10497",
    "authors": [
      "Wenqing Wang",
      "Da Li",
      "Xiatian Zhu",
      "Josef Kittler"
    ],
    "categories": [
      "cs.CV"
    ],
    "license": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
    "title": "mergetune: Continued fine-tuning of vision-language models",
    "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10497",
    "version": "v2"
  },
  "schema_id": "dorsal/arxiv",
  "source": {
    "execution_id": "f2daae5a-a0d6-4ee7-9580-2df6680a782d",
    "id": "arXiv Dataset",
    "type": "Model",
    "variant": "snapshot-2026-01-17",
    "version": "0.1.0"
  },
  "user_id": 1000002
}