In the Cloud-Edge Continuum, dynamic infrastructure change and variable workloads complicate efficient resource management. Centralized methods can struggle to adapt, whilst purely decentralized policies lack global oversight. This paper proposes a hybrid framework using Graph Neural Network (GNN) embeddings and collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Local agents handle neighbourhood-level decisions, and a global orchestrator coordinates system-wide. This work contributes to decentralized application placement strategies with centralized oversight, GNN integration and collaborative MARL for efficient, adaptive and scalable resource management.

Continually learning from non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) data poses a significant challenge in deep learning, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Visual models trained via supervised learning often suffer from overfitting, catastrophic forgetting, and biased representations when faced with sequential tasks. In contrast, pre-trained language models demonstrate greater robustness in managing task sequences due to their generalized knowledge representations, albeit at the cost of high computational resources. Leveraging this advantage, we propose a novel learning strategy, Continual Visual Mapping (CVM), which continuously maps visual representations into a fixed knowledge space derived from a language model. By anchoring learning to this fixed space, CVM enables training small, efficient visual models, making it particularly suited for scenarios where adapting large pre-trained visual models is computationally or data-prohibitive. Empirical evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that CVM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods, showcasing its potential to enhance generalization and mitigate challenges in resource-constrained continual learning settings. • A small visual model can be trained with knowledge space created by a frozen LM. • CVM improves performance and mitigating forgetting in standard benchmarks. • We study the generalization and transfer capabilities of our proposal. • CL method based on a large pre-trained model fails in fine-grained datasets. • CVM achieves similar results with lower inference time in fine-grained datasets.

Continual learning (CL) provides a framework for training models in ever-evolving environments. Although re-occurrence of previously seen objects or tasks is common in real-world problems, the concept of repetition in the data stream is not often considered in standard benchmarks for CL. Unlike with the rehearsal mechanism in buffer-based strategies, where sample repetition is controlled by the strategy, repetition in the data stream naturally stems from the environment. This report provides a summary of the CLVision challenge at CVPR 2023, which focused on the topic of repetition in class-incremental learning. The report initially outlines the challenge objective and then describes three solutions proposed by finalist teams that aim to effectively exploit the repetition in the stream to learn continually. The experimental results from the challenge highlight the effectiveness of ensemble-based solutions that employ multiple versions of similar modules, each trained on different but overlapping subsets of classes. This report underscores the transformative potential of taking a different perspective in CL by employing repetition in the data stream to foster innovative strategy design. • An overview of the continual learning challenge of the CLVision workshop at CVPR 2023. • Novel benchmarks focussing on the topic of repetition in continual learning. • Description and discussion of the strategies submitted by the winning teams. • The results highlight the remarkable effectiveness of ensemble-based solutions.

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning aims at developing agents that are able to continually evolve and adapt to new scenarios. However, this goal is challenging to achieve due to the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting and the high demand of computational resources. Learning from scratch for each new task is not a viable or sustainable option, and thus agents should be able to collect and exploit prior knowledge while facing new problems. While several methodologies have attempted to address the problem from different perspectives, they lack a common structure. In this work, we propose a new framework, I Know How (IKH), which provides a common formalization. Our methodology focuses on modularity and compositionality of knowledge in order to achieve and enhance agent’s ability to learn and adapt efficiently to dynamic environments. To support our framework definition, we present a simple application of it in a simulated driving environment and compare its performance with that of state-of-the-art approaches.

Object detection plays a crucial role in computer-based monitoring tasks, where the adaptability of object detection algorithms to complex and dynamic backgrounds is essential for achieving accurate and stable detection performance.Despite the effectiveness of state-of-the-art object detectors, continual object detection remains a significant challenge in real-world applications.In this study, we utilized a dataset tailored for continual object detection in diverse working environments.Using this dataset, a task-incremental and task-agnostic continual learning scenario was established in which each experience, corresponding to object detection sub-datasets collected from different work sites.Common baseline continual learning (CL) strategies were employed throughout the continual training process to evaluate their efficacy.Our findings, consistent with the CL literature, underscore replay-based strategies as the top performers, assessed across both task-aware and task-agnostic settings.Additionally, zero-shot object detection demonstrates notably lower performance compared to the best-performing CL strategies, emphasizing the critical importance of CL strategies in maintaining consistent detection performance and adapting to new environments and work sites.

The TEACHING project enhances AI applications in pervasive environments via Humanistic Intelligence, fostering synergy between humans and Cyber-Physical Systems of Systems (CPSoS). Here, we present the TEACHING Platform, a microservice-based framework providing the technological advancements to represent humans and CPSoS as containerized software models that interact to mutually empower each other.

In continual learning applications on-the-edge multiple self-centered devices (SCD) learn different local tasks independently, with each SCD only optimizing its own task. Can we achieve (almost) zero-cost collaboration between different devices? We formalize this problem as a Distributed Continual Learning (DCL) scenario, where SCDs greedily adapt to their own local tasks and a separate continual learning (CL) model perform a sparse and asynchronous consolidation step that combines the SCD models sequentially into a single multi-task model without using the original data. Unfortunately, current CL methods are not directly applicable to this scenario. We propose Data-Agnostic Consolidation (DAC), a novel double knowledge distillation method which performs distillation in the latent space via a novel Projected Latent Distillation loss. Experimental results show that DAC enables forward transfer between SCDs and reaches state-of-the-art accuracy on Split CIFAR100, CORe50 and Split TinyImageNet, both in single device and distributed CL scenarios. Somewhat surprisingly, a single out-of-distribution image is sufficient as the only source of data for DAC.

Pre-trained models are commonly used in Continual Learning to initialize the model before training on the stream of non-stationary data. However, pre-training is rarely applied during Continual Learning. We investigate the characteristics of the Continual Pre-Training scenario, where a model is continually pre-trained on a stream of incoming data and only later fine-tuned to different downstream tasks. We introduce an evaluation protocol for Continual Pre-Training which monitors forgetting against a Forgetting Control dataset not present in the continual stream. We disentangle the impact on forgetting of 3 main factors: the input modality (NLP, Vision), the architecture type (Transformer, ResNet) and the pre-training protocol (supervised, self-supervised). Moreover, we propose a Sample-Efficient Pre-training method (SEP) that speeds up the pre-training phase. We show that the pre-training protocol is the most important factor accounting for forgetting. Surprisingly, we discovered that self-supervised continual pre-training in both NLP and Vision is sufficient to mitigate forgetting without the use of any Continual Learning strategy. Other factors, like model depth, input modality and architecture type are not as crucial. • Continual Pre-Training incrementally acquires knowledge from unstructured data streams. • Self-Supervised Continual Pre-Training effectively mitigates forgetting. • The representation drift is reduced by Self-Supervised Continual Pre-Training. • Performance on domain-specific tasks can be improved with a limited amount of data.

Continual learning is the problem of learning from a nonstationary stream of data, a fundamental issue for sustainable and efficient training of deep neural networks over time. Unfortunately, deep learning libraries only provide primitives for offline training, assuming that model's architecture and data are fixed. Avalanche is an open source library maintained by the ContinualAI non-profit organization that extends PyTorch by providing first-class support for dynamic architectures, streams of datasets, and incremental training and evaluation methods. Avalanche provides a large set of predefined benchmarks and training algorithms and it is easy to extend and modular while supporting a wide range of continual learning scenarios. Documentation is available at https://avalanche.continualai.org.

Continual Learning (CL) on time series data represents a promising but under-studied avenue for real-world applications.We propose two new CL benchmarks for Human State Monitoring.We carefully designed the benchmarks to mirror real-world environments in which new subjects are continuously added.We conducted an empirical evaluation to assess the ability of popular CL strategies to mitigate forgetting in our benchmarks.Our results show that, possibly due to the domainincremental properties of our benchmarks, forgetting can be easily tackled even with a simple finetuning and that existing strategies struggle in accumulating knowledge over a fixed, held-out, test subject.* This work has been partially

Continual Learning (CL) refers to a learning setup where data is non stationary and the model has to learn without forgetting existing knowledge.The study of CL for sequential patterns revolves around trained recurrent networks.In this work, instead, we introduce CL in the context of Echo State Networks (ESNs), where the recurrent component is kept fixed.We provide the first evaluation of catastrophic forgetting in ESNs and we highlight the benefits in using CL strategies which are not applicable to trained recurrent models.Our results confirm the ESN as a promising model for CL and open to its use in streaming scenarios.* This work has been partially supported by the H2020 TEACHING

On-device training for personalized learning is a challenging research problem.Being able to quickly adapt deep prediction models at the edge is necessary to better suit personal user needs.However, adaptation on the edge poses some questions on both the efficiency and sustainability of the learning process and on the ability to work under shifting data distributions.Indeed, naively fine-tuning a prediction model only on the newly available data results in catastrophic forgetting, a sudden erasure of previously acquired knowledge.In this paper, we detail the implementation and deployment of a hybrid continual learning strategy (AR1*) on a native Android application for real-time on-device personalization without forgetting.Our benchmark, based on an extension of the CORe50 dataset, shows the efficiency and effectiveness of our solution.23

The recent breakthroughs in computer vision have benefited from the availability of large representative datasets (e.g. ImageNet and COCO) for training. Yet, robotic vision poses unique challenges for applying visual algorithms developed from these standard computer vision datasets due to their implicit assumption over non-varying distributions for a fixed set of tasks. Fully retraining models each time a new task becomes available is infeasible due to computational, storage and sometimes privacy issues, while naïve incremental strategies have been shown to suffer from catastrophic forgetting. It is crucial for the robots to operate continuously under open-set and detrimental conditions with adaptive visual perceptual systems, where lifelong learning is a fundamental capability. However, very few datasets and benchmarks are available to evaluate and compare emerging techniques. To fill this gap, we provide a new lifelong robotic vision dataset ("OpenLORIS-Object") collected via RGB-D cameras. The dataset embeds the challenges faced by a robot in the real-life application and provides new benchmarks for validating lifelong object recognition algorithms. Moreover, we have provided a testbed of 9 state-of-the-art lifelong learning algorithms. Each of them involves 48 tasks with 4 evaluation metrics over the OpenLORIS-Object dataset. The results demonstrate that the object recognition task in the ever-changing difficulty environments is far from being solved and the bottlenecks are at the forward/backward transfer designs. Our dataset and benchmark are publicly available at https://lifelong-robotic-vision.github.io/dataset/object.

Training deep neural networks at the edge on light computational devices, embedded systems and robotic platforms is nowadays very challenging. Continual learning techniques, where complex models are incrementally trained on small batches of new data, can make the learning problem tractable even for CPU-only embedded devices enabling remarkable levels of adaptiveness and autonomy. However, a number of practical problems need to be solved: catastrophic forgetting before anything else. In this paper we introduce an original technique named "Latent Replay" where, instead of storing a portion of past data in the input space, we store activations volumes at some intermediate layer. This can significantly reduce the computation and storage required by native rehearsal. To keep the representation stable and the stored activations valid we propose to slow-down learning at all the layers below the latent replay one, leaving the layers above free to learn at full pace. In our experiments we show that Latent Replay, combined with existing continual learning techniques, achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex video benchmarks such as CORe50 NICv2 (with nearly 400 small and highly non-i.i.d. batches) and OpenLORIS. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of nearly real-time continual learning on the edge through the deployment of the proposed technique on a smartphone device.

It was recently shown that architectural, regularization and rehearsal strategies can be used to train deep models sequentially on a number of disjoint tasks without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. However, these strategies are still unsatisfactory if the tasks are not disjoint but constitute a single incremental task (e.g., class-incremental learning). In this paper we point out the differences between multi-task and single-incremental-task scenarios and show that well-known approaches such as LWF, EWC and SI are not ideal for incremental task scenarios. A new approach, denoted as AR1, combining architectural and regularization strategies is then specifically proposed. AR1 overhead (in terms of memory and computation) is very small thus making it suitable for online learning. When tested on CORe50 and iCIFAR-100, AR1 outperformed existing regularization strategies by a good margin.

Recent works demonstrated the usefulness of temporal coherence to regularize supervised training or to learn invariant features with deep architectures. In particular, enforcing a smooth output change while presenting temporally-closed frames from video sequences, proved to be an effective strategy. In this paper we prove the efficacy of temporal coherence for semi-supervised incremental tuning. We show that a deep architecture, just mildly trained in a supervised manner, can progressively improve its classification accuracy, if exposed to video sequences of unlabeled data. The extent to which, in some cases, a semi-supervised tuning allows to improve classification accuracy (approaching the supervised one) is somewhat surprising. A number of control experiments pointed out the fundamental role of temporal coherence.