Among the most used adaptive algorithms is the Widrow-Hoff’s least mean squares (LMS), which represents a class of stochastic gradient-descent algorithms used in adaptive filtering and machine learning.
Another example is adaptive sort, whose behavior changes upon the presortedness of its input.
An example of an adaptive algorithm in radar systems is the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) detector.
In machine learning and optimization, many algorithms are adaptive or have adaptive variants, which usually means that the algorithm parameters such as learning rate are automatically adjusted according to statistics about the optimisation thus far (e.g. the rate of convergence).
[4] In signal processing, the Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) codec used in MiniDisc recorders is called "adaptive" because the window length (the size of an audio "chunk") can change according to the nature of the sound being compressed, to try to achieve the best-sounding compression strategy.