Seal
Self-Adapting Language Models

Models that continuously adjust parameters, representations, or inference behavior in response to incoming data and feedback to maintain performance under distribution shift are described by SEAL (Self-Adapting Language Models).

SEAL (Self-Adapting Language Models) denote a class of language models that incorporate mechanisms for online, on-device, or continual adaptation so that a deployed model can update itself (or its lightweight adapters) in response to new context, user feedback, or environment shifts without full offline retraining. Architecturally and algorithmically this sits at the intersection of ML (Machine Learning) subfields—online learning, meta-learning, continual learning and domain adaptation—and uses techniques such as parameter-efficient adapters (LoRA-style updates), hypernetworks or fast-weight layers, meta-gradient updates, replay buffers or experience rehearsal to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, and retrieval-augmented conditioning to ground adaptation. The goal is to preserve calibration and safety while improving personalization, robustness to distributional drift, and responsiveness to new concepts; achieving that requires careful design of update triggers, regularization (to control plasticity), trust and provenance signals (to avoid poisoning), and compute/latency trade-offs for edge or production deployments. Evaluation emphasizes forward/backward transfer, regret under non-stationarity, stability-plasticity trade-offs, and safe adaptation metrics, and the paradigm is especially relevant for conversational agents, continual domain-specific assistants, and constrained-edge inference where periodic centralized retraining is impractical.

First used: emerged in the early 2020s (concepts visible circa 2021–2023); gained popularity in the mid-2020s as scalable online fine-tuning, adapter methods, and continual-learning techniques entered production (around 2023–2025).