Toward Robust Open-set Adaptation: Synapse Consolidation Inspired by Rac1/MAPK Pathways

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) generalize across tasks through reusable representations and flexible reasoning, yet remain brittle in real deployment when faced with evolving tasks and continual distribution shift. While test-time adaptation addresses this by updating models with unsupervised objectives on test data, prevailing methods are fundamentally limited by their neglect of source knowledge preservation and adaptation signal reliability. Inspired by how Drosophila orchestrates memory update by balancing retroactive and proactive interference via Rac1 and MAPK pathways, we design Synapse Consolidation (SyCo) with two core components: a Rac1-inspired plasticity confiner and a MAPK-inspired update controller. The former dynamically confines plasticity to a tail-gradient subspace that is less critical for source knowledge, enabling rapid specialization while preserving source representations. The latter uses a tiered controller to suppress noisy updates and consolidate useful adaptations under non-stationary streams. To further model real deployments with multiple sources and continually emerging tasks, we introduce Multi-source Open-set Adaptation (MOA) setting, where a model is trained on multiple labeled source tasks and then adapts on open, non-stationary unlabeled test streams mixing seen and unseen tasks with partial overlap in label and intent space. Across 18 NLP datasets under the MOA setting, SyCo consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving 78.31\% on unseen-task adaptation and 85.37\% versus unseen-data shifts, setting a new state-of-the-art.