Poly Instance Recurrent Neural Network for Real-time Lifelong Learning at the Low-power Edge

As machine learning moves towards edge deployment, lifelong learning becomes crucial due to evolving data distributions and new tasks. Yet, applying traditional methods to learn from vast, complex IoT data streams poses challenges. These include excessive CPU usage, RAM overflow, prolonged convergence times disrupting device operation, and difficulties in adapting to concept drift. Consequently, models trained on devices struggle to handle frequently changing data, affecting their ability to respond effectively to new inputs.To address these issues, we introduce Poly Instance Lifelong Learning (PILL), an algorithm designed for real-time on-device model training and inference at the edge under lifelong learning settings. PILL is lightweight, operating efficiently on the CPUs of low-power single-board computers (SBCs). It achieves this by partitioning input data into manageable instances, filtering out label noise, and applying early stopping for rapid predictions.PILL was evaluated on three popular low-power SBCs as well as a high-end Windows 10 machine using four datasets of different sizes and features. The results indicate that despite the superior resources of the Windows 10 machine, models trained using PILL on SBCs differ in accuracy by only ±0.05%. Additionally, PILL’s LSTM trains 2.41 - 2.85 times faster than the widely used Scikit-Learn’s LSTM. Additionally, when compared to ten state-of-the-art methods, PILL demonstrated superior performance across key metrics (Precision, Recall, and F1-Score) while minimizing computational overhead, making it an ideal choice for efficient, real-time edge deployment.