In-Cell Learning: Language Models That Update Their Own Weights in Sequence Without Changing the File They Ship
Authors: Zifeng Liu, Yaxin Lu, Xuanhan Wu, Zhiyong Du, Yiming Mao, Zhenhe Wang, Wenqi Shi, Zhengkun Jing, +1 more
Organizations: Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Center, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University · Institute for Frontier Interdisciplinary Research in Health Sciences and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University · Sun Yat-sen University Institute of Artificial Intelligence · Guangdong Engineering Research Center of Medical Artificial Intelligence Multimodal System · Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA · School of Business, Sun Yat-sen University · School of Computer Science, China University of Geosciences (Wuhan) · School of Public Health, Sun Yat-sen University · Hospital of Stomatology, Sun Yat-sen University · School of Pharmacy, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University
A 4-bit quantized weight specifies a rounding cell rather than a single full-precision value. We introduce in-cell learning, a paradigm for writing new knowledge only within these cells, so that re-quantizing the served weights reproduces the released integer codes and scales exactly. CellFill implements this idea with bounded trainable positions inside frozen quantization cells and ships the update as a separate, subtractively revocable file. Across published NF4 and W4A16 releases of Qwen3 and Gemma from 1.7B to 32B parameters, CellFill writes 83-99% of a real-fact corpus while returning the stored code on every constrained weight. The injected facts generalize to paraphrases and composition, and answer 78-88% of selected PopQA questions that the released model misses. Sequential experiments show that rehearsal preserves earlier knowledge, whereas available room and new-task plasticity decline across updates. Consolidation re-quantizes the learned weights to produce a declared major version, restoring room at a measured capability cost. A six-task write-rehearse-consolidate cycle retains at least 92.8% of first learning in two 8B runs and records zero code violations over 6.9 billion constrained weights at every fold. These results define a version-management protocol in which minor updates preserve the released quantized artifact bitwise and major updates are explicit, measurable, and verifiable.