When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting

The study presents findings on pathway-dependent forgetting in multimodal models, revealing that knowledge acquired through text is forgotten more easily than knowledge acquired through audio under identical adaptation pressures. Utilizing the Paired Pathway Controlled Protocol (PPCP), the research establishes that this effect is consistent across various audio-language model architectures and is primarily influenced by input representation rather than architectural depth. These insights suggest that practitioners should consider the acquisition route of knowledge when designing multimodal systems to mitigate forgetting.