Accelerating Continual Learning on Edge FPGA

Real-time edge AI systems operating in dynamic environments must learn quickly from streaming input samples without needing to undergo offline model training. We propose an FPGA accelerator for continual learning based on streaming linear discriminant analysis (SLDA), which is capable of class-incremental object classification. The proposed SLDA accelerator employs application-specific parallelism, efficient data reuse, resource sharing, and approximate computing to achieve high performance and power efficiency. Additionally, we introduce a new variant of SLDA and discuss the accuracy-efficiency trade-offs. The proposed SLDA accelerator is combined with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). which is implemented on Xilinx DPU to achieve full continual learning capability at nearly the same latency as inference. Experiments based on popular datasets for continual learning, CoRE50 and CUB200, demonstrate that the proposed SLDA accelerator outperforms the embedded CPU and GPU counterparts, in terms of speed and energy efficiency.