CART: Compatible Routing for Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning

Ling-Xiang Zhang, Tao Hu, Da-Wei Zhou

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance through instruction tuning, yet real-world applications often require them to continually acquire new capabilities from sequential tasks, i.e., Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT). In typical MLLMs, a projector is employed to align visual representations with the language model. However, existing methods primarily protect the language model from forgetting while continuously updating the projector across tasks. Such asymmetric adaptation can cause substantial representation drift in the projector, increasing the mismatch between the projector and language model and consequently exacerbating catastrophic forgetting. To address this issue, we propose Compatible Routing (CART), which explicitly coordinates the adaptation of the projector and language model. Specifically, CART maintains task-specific experts for both modules and combines them through weighted mixtures. CART jointly infers their weights by considering both expert relevance and cross-module compatibility, thereby promoting coordinated adaptation between the two modules. To further control model growth, we introduce relevance-guided expert…