CLIP-FMoE: Scalable CLIP via Fused Mixture-of-Experts with Enforced Specialization

Abstract

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have emerged as a promising approach for scaling deep learning models while maintaining computational efficiency. However, existing MoE adaptations for Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models suffer from significant computational overhead during sequential training and degradation of zero-shot capabilities. To address these limitations, we propose CLIP-FMoE, a novel approach that integrates MoE architecture into CLIP fine-tuning. Our method uses Isolated Constrained Contrastive Learning, a pipeline that trains specialized experts on cluster-based data partitions to accelerate expert specialization. Additionally, we introduce a Fusion Gate mechanism to mitigate catastrophic forgetting of pre-trained knowledge. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves consistent improvements on downstream tasks while preserving zero-shot capabilities. Furthermore, our method demonstrates robust performance across varying context lengths, making it particularly suitable for diverse real-world applications.