How to Teach Large Multimodal Models New Skills
Authors: name: Zhen Zhu, name: Yiming Gong, name: Yao Xiao, name: Yaoyao Liu, name: Derek Hoiem
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing
prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while
monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model
families. We observe that apparent "forgetting" on held-out tasks after narrow
fine-tuning can partly recover at later stages. We trace this behavior to a
measurable shift in the output token distribution, manifested through a simple
counting-bias probe that co-varies with forgetting. Guided by this picture, we
identify two simple, robust tuning recipes that learn strongly while limiting
drift: (i) updating only the self-attention projection layers, and (ii)
updating only the MLP Gate&Up while freezing the Down projection. Across models
and tasks, these choices deliver strong target gains while largely preserving
held-out performance. Code is available at
https://github.com/jessemelpolio/LMM_CL