Self-Indexing Latent Memories for Access-Aware Continual Instruction Tuning of LLMs

arXiv:2611.11684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual instruction tuning often preserves old skills with task-private modules. Inference still requires selecting the right module from the prompt alone. We introduce Task-Isolated Latent Adapter Continual Training (TILA-CT), a replay-free method that makes each task module self-indexing. Each task receives a latent memory and adapter bank in a frozen LLM. During adaptation, the memory gathers causal-prefix information and injects task-conditioned context. For access, its persistent state provides the routing prototype used by a shared prompt-only router. On the 8-task CT-Pipeline stream, TILA-CT achieves 65.19 acquisition and 63.98 final macro score, with 1.38 points of average forgetting. A middle-reversed order gives 65.38 acquisition and 64.17 final macro score. Across 6 backbones, final scores remain within 1.5 points of acquisition. Ablations support memory-derived routing keys and causal gathering. Final macro routing accuracy is 93.9\%, and oracle routing recovers 1.21 final macro points. These results separate preserved task computation from learned access to it.