# Forgetting-Resistant and Lesion-Aware Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Analysis with Vision-Language Model Source: [Forgetting-Resistant and Lesion-Aware Source-Free Domain Adaptive Fundus Image Analysis with Vision-Language Model]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2026-08-12T05:00:21.403Z Authors: Zheang Huai, Hui Tang, Hualiang Wang, Xiaomeng Li Published: 2026-02-23T03:29:54.000Z ## Abstract Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a model trained in the source domain to perform well in the target domain, with only unlabeled target domain data and the source model. Taking into account that conventional SFDA methods are inevitably error-prone under domain shift, recently greater attention has been directed to SFDA assisted with off-the-shelf foundation models, e.g., vision-language (ViL) models. However, existing works of leveraging ViL models for SFDA confront two issues: (i) Although mutual information is exploited to consider the joint distribution between the predictions of ViL model and the target model, we argue that the forgetting of some superior predictions of the target model still occurs, as indicated by the decline of the accuracies of certain classes during adaptation; (ii) Prior research disregards the rich, fine-grained knowledge embedded in the ViL model, which offers detailed grounding for fundus image diagnosis. In this paper, we introduce a novel forgetting-resistant and lesion-aware (FRLA) method for SFDA of fundus image diagnosis with ViL model. Specifically, a forgetting-resistant adaptation module explicitly preserves the confident predictions of the target model, and a lesion-aware adaptation module yields patch-wise predictions from ViL model and employs them to help the target model be aware of the lesion areas and leverage the ViL model's fine-grained knowledge. Extensive experiments show that our method not only significantly outperforms the vision-language model, but also achieves consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. Our code will be released. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Fundus Image Classification on ODIR to FIVES (target)](): Fundus Image Classification; ODIR to FIVES (target); Average Score: 80.4. - [Fundus Image Classification on ODIR to VietAI (target)](): Fundus Image Classification; ODIR to VietAI (target); Avg Score: 80.8. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()