Streaming Generated Gaussian Process Experts for Online Learning and Control

Abstract: Gaussian Processes (GPs), as a nonparametric learning method, offer flexible modeling capabilities and calibrated uncertainty quantification for function approximations. Additionally, GPs support online learning by efficiently incorporating new data with polynomial-time computation, making them well-suited for safety-critical dynamical systems that require rapid adaptation. However, the inference and online updates of exact GPs, when processing streaming data, incur cubic computation time and quadratic storage memory complexity, limiting their scalability to large datasets in real-time settings. In this paper, we propose a streaming kernel-induced progressively generated expert framework of Gaussian processes (SkyGP) that addresses both computational and memory constraints by maintaining a bounded set of experts, while inheriting the learning performance guarantees from exact Gaussian processes. Furthermore, two SkyGP variants are introduced, each tailored to a specific objective, either maximizing prediction accuracy (SkyGP-Dense) or improving computational efficiency (SkyGP-Fast). The effectiveness of SkyGP is validated through extensive benchmarks and real-time control experiments demonstrating its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.