EdgeSync: Accelerating Edge-Model Updates for Data Drift through Adaptive Continuous Learning

EdgeSync: Accelerating Edge-Model Updates for Data Drift through Adaptive Continuous Learning Runchu Dong, Peng Zhao, Guiqin Wang, Nan Qi, Jie Lin A more efficient edge-model updating approach that automatically and continuously adapts models to the scene with data drift. A novel method for filtering video streaming samples that integrates timeliness and adaptability to eliminate unnecessary samples. A continuous training manager that optimizes the training schedule and duration using both labeled and computed features. Abstract Real-time video analytics systems typically deploy lightweight models on edge devices to reduce latency. However, the distribution of data features may change over time due to various factors such as changing lighting and weather conditions, leading to decreased model accuracy. Recent frameworks try to address this issue by leveraging remote servers to continuously train and adapt lightweight edge models using more complex models in the cloud. Despite these advancements, existing methods face two key challenges: first, the retraining process is compute-intensive, causing significant delays in model updates; second, the new model may not align well with the evolving data distribution of the current video stream. To address these challenges, we introduce EdgeSync, an efficient edge-model updating approach that enhances sample filtering by incorporating timeliness and inference results, thus ensuring training samples are more relevant to the current video content while reducing update delays. Additionally, EdgeSync features a dynamic training management module that optimizes the timing and sequencing of model updates to improve their timeliness. Evaluations on diverse and complex real-world datasets demonstrate that EdgeSync improves accuracy by approximately 3.4% compared to existing methods and by about 10% compared to traditional approaches. Introduction Real-time video analytics has significant potential across a range of applications, including augmented reality, video surveillance, and traffic detection [1]. Recent advancements in deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly improved the performance of video analysis, with some models even surpassing human accuracy in certain scenarios [2, 3, 4].