Search for: All records

Federated continual learning is a decentralized approach that enables edge devices to continuously learn new data, mitigating catastrophic forgetting while collaboratively training a global model. However, existing state-of-the-art approaches in federated continual learning focus primarily on learning continuously to classify discrete sets of images, leaving dense regression tasks such as depth estimation unaddressed. Furthermore, autonomous agents that use depth estimation to explore dynamic indoor environments inevitably encounter spatial and temporal shifts in data distributions. These shifts trigger a phenomenon called spatio-temporal catastrophic forgetting, a more complex and challenging form of catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we address the fundamental research question: “Can we mitigate spatiotemporal catastrophic forgetting in federated continual learning for depth estimation in dynamic indoor environments?”. To address this question, we propose Local Online and Continual Adaptation (LOCA), the first approach to address spatio-temporal catastrophic forgetting in dynamic indoor environments. LOCA relies on two key algorithmic innovations: online batch skipping and continual local aggregation. Our extensive experiments show that LOCA mitigates spatio-temporal catastrophic forgetting and improves global model performance, while running on-device up to 3.35× faster and consuming 3.13× less energy compared to state-of-the-art. Thus, LOCA lays the groundwork for scalable autonomous systems that adapt in real time to learn private and dynamic indoor environments. 

A central challenge in machine learning deployment is maintaining accurate and updated models as the deployment environment changes over time. We present a hardware/software framework for simultaneous training and inference for monocular depth estimation on edge devices. Our proposed framework can be used as a hardware/software co-design tool that enables continual and online federated learning on edge devices. Our results show real-time training and inference performance, demonstrating the feasibility of online learning on edge devices.