Visual instruction tuning (VIT) enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to effectively handle a wide range of vision tasks by framing them as language-based instructions. Building on this, continual visual instruction tuning (CVIT) extends the capability of MLLMs to incrementally learn new tasks, accommodating evolving functionalities. While prior work has advanced CVIT through the development of new benchmarks and approaches to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, these efforts largely follow traditional continual learning paradigms, neglecting the unique challenges specific to CVIT. We identify a dual form of catastrophic forgetting in CVIT, where MLLMs not only forget previously learned visual understanding but also experience a decline in instruction following abilities as they acquire new tasks. To address this, we introduce the Separable Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation (SMoLoRA) framework, which employs separable routing through two distinct modules - one for visual understanding and another for instruction following. This dual-routing design enables specialized adaptation in both domains, preventing forgetting while improving performance. Furthermore, we propose a novel CVIT benchmark that goes beyond existing benchmarks by additionally evaluating a model's ability to generalize to unseen tasks and handle diverse instructions across various tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SMoLoRA outperforms existing methods in mitigating dual forgetting, improving generalization to unseen tasks, and ensuring robustness in following diverse instructions.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized open-domain dialogue agents but encounter challenges in multi-character role-playing (MCRP) scenarios. To address the issue, we present Neeko, an innovative framework designed for efficient multiple characters imitation. Unlike existing methods, Neeko employs a dynamic low-rank adapter (LoRA) strategy, enabling it to adapt seamlessly to diverse characters. Our framework breaks down the role-playing process into agent pre-training, multiple characters playing, and character incremental learning, effectively handling both seen and unseen roles. This dynamic approach, coupled with distinct LoRA blocks for each character, enhances Neeko's adaptability to unique attributes, personalities, and speaking patterns. As a result, Neeko demonstrates superior performance in MCRP over most existing methods, offering more engaging and versatile user interaction experiences. Code and data are available at https://github.com/weiyifan1023/Neeko.

As one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is commonly applied to fine-tune large language models (LLMs). However, updating the weights of LoRA blocks effectively and expeditiously is challenging due to the long calculation path in the original model. To address this, we propose ResLoRA, an improved framework of LoRA. By adding residual paths during training and using merging approaches to eliminate these extra paths during inference, our method can achieve better results in fewer training steps without any extra trainable parameters or inference cost compared to LoRA. The experiments on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. To the best of our knowledge, ResLoRA is the first work that combines the residual path with LoRA. The code of our method is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps/tree/main/reslora .

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, whist they still need updates after deployment to fix errors or keep pace with the changing knowledge in the world. Researchers formulate such problem as Model Editing and have developed various editors focusing on different axes of editing properties. However, current editors can hardly support all properties and rely on heavy computational resources. In this paper, we propose a plug-in Model Editing method based on neuron-indexed dynamic LoRA (MELO), which alters the behavior of language models by dynamically activating certain LoRA blocks according to the index built in an inner vector database. Our method satisfies various editing properties with high efficiency and can be easily integrated into multiple LLM backbones. Experimental results show that our proposed MELO achieves state-of-the-art editing performance on three sequential editing tasks (document classification, question answering and hallucination correction), while requires the least trainable parameters and computational cost.