Efficient Continual Learning with Low Memory Footprint For Edge Device

Continual learning(CL) is a useful technique to acquire dynamic knowledge continually. Although powerful cloud platforms can fully exert the ability of CL,e.g., customized recommendation systems, similar personalized requirements for edge devices are almost disregarded. This phenomenon stems from the huge resource overhead involved in training neural networks and overcoming the forgetting problem of CL. This paper focuses on these scenarios and proposes a compact algorithm called LightCL. Different from other CL methods bringing huge resource consumption to acquire generalizability among all tasks for delaying forgetting, LightCL compress the resource consumption of already generalized components in neural networks and uses a few extra resources to improve memory in other parts. We first propose two new metrics of learning plasticity and memory stability to seek generalizability during CL. Based on the discovery that lower and middle layers have more generalizability and deeper layers are opposite, we Maintain Generalizability by freezing the lower and middle layers. Then, we Memorize Feature Patterns to stabilize the feature extracting patterns of previous tasks to improve generalizability in deeper layers. In the experimental comparison, LightCL outperforms other SOTA methods in delaying forgetting and reduces at most 6.16× memory footprint, proving the excellent performance of LightCL in efficiency. We also evaluate the efficiency of our method on an edge device, the Jetson Nano, which further proves our method's practical effectiveness.