CASCADE: Case-Based Continual Adaptation for Large Language Models During Deployment

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guo, Siyuan, Du, Yali, Chen, Hechang, Chang, Yi, Wang, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Guo, Siyuan
Du, Yali
Chen, Hechang
Chang, Yi
Wang, Jun
author_facet Guo, Siyuan
Du, Yali
Chen, Hechang
Chang, Yi
Wang, Jun
contents Large language models (LLMs) have become a central foundation of modern artificial intelligence, yet their lifecycle remains constrained by a rigid separation between training and deployment, after which learning effectively ceases. This limitation contrasts with natural intelligence, which continually adapts through interaction with its environment. In this paper, we formalise deployment-time learning (DTL) as the third stage in the LLM lifecycle that enables LLM agents to improve from experience during deployment without modifying model parameters. We present CASCADE (CASe-based Continual Adaptation during DEployment), a general and principled framework that equips LLM agents with an explicit, evolving episodic memory. CASCADE formulates experience reuse as a contextual bandit problem, enabling principled exploration-exploitation trade-offs and establishing no-regret guarantees over long-term interactions. This design allows agents to accumulate, select, and refine task-relevant cases, transforming past experience into actionable knowledge. Across 16 diverse tasks spanning medical diagnosis, legal analysis, code generation, web search, tool use, and embodied interaction, CASCADE improves macro-averaged success rate by 20.9% over zero-shot prompting while consistently outperforming gradient-based and memory-based baselines. By reframing deployment as an adaptive learning process, this work establishes a foundation for continually improving AI systems.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_06702
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CASCADE: Case-Based Continual Adaptation for Large Language Models During Deployment
Guo, Siyuan
Du, Yali
Chen, Hechang
Chang, Yi
Wang, Jun
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) have become a central foundation of modern artificial intelligence, yet their lifecycle remains constrained by a rigid separation between training and deployment, after which learning effectively ceases. This limitation contrasts with natural intelligence, which continually adapts through interaction with its environment. In this paper, we formalise deployment-time learning (DTL) as the third stage in the LLM lifecycle that enables LLM agents to improve from experience during deployment without modifying model parameters. We present CASCADE (CASe-based Continual Adaptation during DEployment), a general and principled framework that equips LLM agents with an explicit, evolving episodic memory. CASCADE formulates experience reuse as a contextual bandit problem, enabling principled exploration-exploitation trade-offs and establishing no-regret guarantees over long-term interactions. This design allows agents to accumulate, select, and refine task-relevant cases, transforming past experience into actionable knowledge. Across 16 diverse tasks spanning medical diagnosis, legal analysis, code generation, web search, tool use, and embodied interaction, CASCADE improves macro-averaged success rate by 20.9% over zero-shot prompting while consistently outperforming gradient-based and memory-based baselines. By reframing deployment as an adaptive learning process, this work establishes a foundation for continually improving AI systems.
title CASCADE: Case-Based Continual Adaptation for Large Language Models During Deployment
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.06702