Catastrophic Forgetting Mitigation via Discrepancy-Weighted Experience Replay

Abstract: Continually adapting edge models in cloud-edge collaborative object detection for traffic monitoring suffers from catastrophic forgetting, where models lose previously learned knowledge when adapting to new data distributions. This is especially problematic in dynamic traffic environments characterised by periodic variations (e.g., day/night, peak hours), where past knowledge remains valuable. Existing approaches like experience replay and visual prompts offer some mitigation, but struggle to effectively prioritize and leverage historical data for optimal knowledge retention and adaptation. Specifically, simply storing and replaying all historical data can be inefficient, while treating all historical experiences as equally important overlooks their varying relevance to the current domain. This paper proposes ER-EMU, an edge model update algorithm based on adaptive experience replay, to address these limitations. ER-EMU utilizes a limited-size experience buffer managed using a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) principle, and a novel Domain Distance Metric-based Experience Selection (DDM-ES) algorithm. DDM-ES employs the multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MK-MMD) to quantify the dissimilarity between target domains, prioritizing the selection of historical data that is most dissimilar to the current target domain. This ensures training diversity and facilitates the retention of knowledge from a wider range of past experiences, while also preventing overfitting to the new domain. The experience buffer is also updated using a simple random sampling strategy to maintain a balanced representation of previous domains. Experiments on the Bellevue traffic video dataset, involving repeated day/night cycles, demonstrate that ER-EMU consistently improves the performance of several state-of-the-art cloud-edge collaborative object detection frameworks.