By generating seeds in embedding space rather than pixel space, we avoid the compounding errors of full image generation. The hypernetwork’s meta-learning objective ensures that seeds are discriminative for the original task and compatible with the continually updated VLM.

[5] Zhang, Y., et al. (2024). VLM-CL: A benchmark for continual learning in vision-language models. NeurIPS Datasets Track.

[3] Zhou, K., et al. (2022). Learning to prompt for vision-language models. IJCV.

During continual learning, the model is trained sequentially on each task. After learning ( \mathcalT t ), the model should perform well on all seen tasks ( \mathcalT 1:t ) without access to previous data. We allow a small episodic memory ( M ) (size ( K )) that stores generated seeds , not real examples.

: (1) Performance on highly structured tasks (e.g., VQA with relational reasoning) drops by 6% compared to exemplar replay. (2) The generator’s meta-update requires 5% of training data as a validation set – not always available. (3) Seed interpretability: unlike real images, seeds are opaque vectors. 8. Conclusion We presented Auto-Seed VL2, a framework for autonomous seed generation in vision-language continual learning. By synthesizing compact, cross-modal aligned seeds conditioned on task gradients, Auto-Seed VL2 eliminates the need for storing real data while achieving superior performance over replay-based methods. Our results demonstrate that synthetic embedding replay is a viable and often superior alternative to exemplar storage. Future work includes extending to online (single-pass) continual learning and exploring seed decomposition for compositional tasks. Acknowledgments [Redacted for blind review] References [1] Radford, A., et al. (2021). Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. ICML.

Auto-Seed VL2 maintains a set of auto-generated seeds ( \mathcalS ) that grows slowly over tasks. Auto-Seed VL2 operates in three phases per task: (1) Seed replay, (2) Online adaptation, (3) Seed update. 4.1 Overall Architecture