Online Task Adaptation via Self-Organisation

Abstract

Neural networks are typically adapted by computing gradients and updating model parameters. We investigate whether task-specific adaptation can instead emerge from a meta-learned self-organising process that requires no gradients at adaptation time. We instantiate this idea with a Neural Cellular Automaton in which locally interacting recurrent cells maintain both a recurrent state and a fast associative memory. During meta-training, backpropagation is used to learn the recurrent dynamics together with how the memory is read and written. Once training is complete, the slow model parameters remain fixed, and online adaptation occurs only through cellwise memory updates driven by local prediction errors and a delta rule. We evaluate whether the learned mechanism can adapt to semantically distinct held-out classification tasks. A single pass over the support data produces substantial improvements in held-out performance without gradient computation or parameter updates during adaptation, and the mechanism remains effective across large changes in the number of examples processed jointly. These results show that task-specific adaptation can be achieved through explicit fast-memory updates while keeping the slow model parameters fixed.