Memory-Integrated Reconfigurable Adapters: A Unified Framework for Settings with Multiple Tasks
Susmit Agrawal, Krishn Vishwas Kher, Saksham Mittal, Swarnim Maheshwari, Vineeth N Balasubramanian
Organisms constantly pivot between tasks such as evading predators, foraging, traversing rugged terrain, and socializing, often within milliseconds. Remarkably, they preserve knowledge of once-learned environments sans catastrophic forgetting, a phenomenon neuroscientists hypothesize, is due to a singular neural circuitry dynamically overlayed by neuromodulatory agents such as dopamine and acetylcholine.In parallel, deep learning research addresses analogous challenges via domain generalization ($\textbf{DG}$) and continual learning ($\textbf{CL}$), yet these methods remain siloed, despite the brain’s ability to perform them seamlessly. In particular, prior work has not explored architectures involving associative memories ($\textbf{AM}$s), which are an integral part of biological systems, to jointly address these tasks. We propose Memory-Integrated Reconfigurable Adapters ($\textbf{MIRA}$), a unified framework that integrates Hopfield-style associative memory modules atop a shared backbone. These memory modules store adapter-weight updates as values and retrieve them via learned keys. Associative memory keys are learned post-hoc to index and retrieve an affine combination of stored adapter updates for any given task or domain on a per-sample basis. By varying only the task-specific objectives, we demonstrate that $\textbf{MIRA}$ seamlessly accommodates domain shifts and sequential task exposures under one roof. Empirical evaluations on standard benchmarks confirm that our $\textbf{AM}$-augmented architecture significantly enhances adaptability and retention: in $\textbf{DG}$, $\textbf{MIRA}$ achieves SoTA out-of-distribution accuracy, and in incremental learning settings, it outperforms architectures explicitly designed to handle catastrophic forgetting using generic $\textbf{CL}$ algorithms. Extensive ablation studies validate the necessity of both associative memory storage and post-hoc key learning for robust interpolated retrieval of adapters. By unifying adapter-based modulation with biologically inspired associative memory, $\textbf{MIRA}$ delivers rapid task switching and enduring knowledge retention in a single extensible architecture, charting a path toward more versatile and memory-augmented AI systems.