Cloud-Device Collaborative Adaptation to Continual Changing Environments in the Real-World

When facing changing environments in the real world, the lightweight model on client devices suffer from severe performance drop under distribution shifts. The main limitations of existing device model lie in: (1) unable to update due to the computation limit of the device, (2) limited generalization ability of the lightweight model. Meanwhile, recent large models have shown strong generalization capability on cloud while they can not be deployed on client devices due to the poor computation constraint. To enable the device model to deal with changing environments, we propose a new learning paradigm of Cloud-Device Collaborative Continual Adaptation. To encourage collaboration between cloud and device and improve the generalization of device model, we propose an Uncertainty-based Visual Prompt Adapted (U-VPA) teacher-student model in such paradigm. Specifically, we first design the Uncertainty Guided Sampling (UGS) to screen out challenging data continuously and transmit the most out-of-distribution samples from the device to the cloud. To further transfer the generalization capability of the large model on the cloud to the device model, we propose a Visual Prompt Learning Strategy with Uncertainty guided updating (VPLU) to specifically deal with the selected samples with more distribution shifts. Then, we transmit the visual prompts to the device and concatenate them with the incoming data to pull the device testing distribution closer to the cloud training distribution. We conduct extensive experiments on two object detection datasets with continually changing environments. Our proposed U-VPA teacher-student framework outperforms previous state-of-the-art test time adaptation and device-cloud collaboration methods. The code and datasets will be released.