Intelligence Beyond the Edge Using Hyperdimensional Computing

On-device learning has emerged as a prevailing trend that avoids the slow response time and costly communication of cloud-based learning. The ability to learn continuously and indefinitely in a changing environment, and with resource constraints, is critical for real sensor deployments. However, existing designs are inadequate for practical scenarios with (i) streaming data input, (ii) lack of supervision and (iii) limited on-board resources. In this paper, we design and deploy the first on-device lifelong learning system called LifeHD for general IoT applications with limited supervision. LifeHD is designed based on a novel neurally-inspired and lightweight learning paradigm called Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC). We utilize a two-tier associative memory organization to intelligently store and manage high-dimensional, low-precision vectors, which represent the historical patterns as cluster centroids. We additionally propose two variants of LifeHD to cope with scarce labeled inputs and power constraints. We implement LifeHD on off-the-shelf edge platforms and perform extensive evaluations across three scenarios. Our measurements show that LifeHD improves the unsupervised clustering accuracy by up to 74.8% compared to the state-of-the-art NN-based unsupervised lifelong learning baselines with as much as 34.3x better energy efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/Orienfish/LifeHD.