# Catastrophic Forgetting Mitigation via Discrepancy-Weighted Experience Replay

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00042 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00042/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [DINO: DETR with Improved DeNoising Anchor Boxes for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.03605/) (2022)
- [Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09601/) (2017)
- [DETRs Beat YOLOs on Real-time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08069/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Object Detectors: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13502/) (2021)
- [Real-Time Video Inference on Edge Devices via Adaptive Model Streaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.06628/) (2020)
- [Cloud-Device Collaborative Adaptation to Continual Changing Environments in the Real-world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00972/) (2022)
- [Shoggoth: Towards Efficient Edge-Cloud Collaborative Real-Time Video Inference via Adaptive Online Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15333/) (2023)
- [A Multi-constraint and Multi-objective Allocation Model for Emergency Rescue in IoT Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10299/) (2024)
- [High-Quality Pseudo-Label Generation Based on Visual Prompt Assisted Cloud Model Update](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00526/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.
