Progressive Homeostatic and Plastic Prompt Tuning for Audio-Visual Multi-Task Incremental Learning

Audio-visual multi-task incremental learning aims to continuously learn from multiple audio-visual tasks without the need for joint training on all tasks. The challenge of the problem is how to preserve the old task knowledge while facilitating the learning of new task with previous experiences. To address these challenges, we introduce a three-stage Progressive Homeostatic and Plastic audio-visual prompt (PHP) method. In the shallow phase, we design the task-shared modality aggregating adapter to foster cross-task and cross-modal audio-visual representation learning to enhance shared understanding between tasks. In the middle phase, we propose the task-specific modality-shared dynamic generating adapter, which constructs prompts that are tailored to individual tasks while remaining general across modalities, which balances the model’s ability to retain knowledge against forgetting with its potential for versatile multi-task transferability. In the deep phase, we introduce the task-specific modality-independent prompts to further refine the understand ability by targeting individual information for each task and modality. By incorporating these three phases, PHP retains task-specific prompts while adapting shared parameters for new tasks to effectively balance knowledge sharing and specificity. Our method achieves SOTA performance in different orders of three tasks~(AVE, AVVP and AVQA). We will release the source codes on GitHub.