CaLLM: Continual Adaptation of LLMs via Non-Parametric Adapter Routing

Continual adaptation of large language models (LLMs) to evolving task distributions while mitigating catastrophic forgetting remains an open problem. Existing strategies often struggle to scale or lack a robust mechanism for zero-shot task-to-expert assignment. We introduce CaLLM, a framework that resolves these tensions by combining metric-based meta-learning with modular parameter isolation via lightweight adapters. First, CaLLM projects each input batch into a task-agnostic embedding space to find its nearest prototype. It then routes the batch to the specific adapter specialized for that data distribution. This formulation provides (i)~controllable cross-task interference by design, (ii)~constant computational complexity regardless of task count, (iii)~seamless integration of novel distributions through prototype expansion, and (iv)~regime agnosticism as the local routing decision enables a unified approach to both online and offline settings. Our experiments demonstrate that this routing mechanism discovers semantically coherent task groupings while facilitating constructive interference between similar tasks, and keeping overhead at a minimum. Across diverse and fine-grained continual learning benchmarks, CaLLM consistently outperforms traditional isolation and replay methods, establishing prototype-based modular routing as a principled and scalable approach to lifelong adaptation of LLMs.