ConSense: Continually Sensing Human Activity with WiFi via Growing and Picking

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Main Authors: Li, Rong, Deng, Tao, Feng, Siwei, Sun, Mingjie, Jia, Juncheng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Li, Rong
Deng, Tao
Feng, Siwei
Sun, Mingjie
Jia, Juncheng
author_facet Li, Rong
Deng, Tao
Feng, Siwei
Sun, Mingjie
Jia, Juncheng
contents WiFi-based human activity recognition (HAR) holds significant application potential across various fields. To handle dynamic environments where new activities are continuously introduced, WiFi-based HAR systems must adapt by learning new concepts without forgetting previously learned ones. Furthermore, retaining knowledge from old activities by storing historical exemplar is impractical for WiFi-based HAR due to privacy concerns and limited storage capacity of edge devices. In this work, we propose ConSense, a lightweight and fast-adapted exemplar-free class incremental learning framework for WiFi-based HAR. The framework leverages the transformer architecture and involves dynamic model expansion and selective retraining to preserve previously learned knowledge while integrating new information. Specifically, during incremental sessions, small-scale trainable parameters that are trained specifically on the data of each task are added in the multi-head self-attention layer. In addition, a selective retraining strategy that dynamically adjusts the weights in multilayer perceptron based on the performance stability of neurons across tasks is used. Rather than training the entire model, the proposed strategies of dynamic model expansion and selective retraining reduce the overall computational load while balancing stability on previous tasks and plasticity on new tasks. Evaluation results on three public WiFi datasets demonstrate that ConSense not only outperforms several competitive approaches but also requires fewer parameters, highlighting its practical utility in class-incremental scenarios for HAR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17483
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ConSense: Continually Sensing Human Activity with WiFi via Growing and Picking
Li, Rong
Deng, Tao
Feng, Siwei
Sun, Mingjie
Jia, Juncheng
Signal Processing
Machine Learning
WiFi-based human activity recognition (HAR) holds significant application potential across various fields. To handle dynamic environments where new activities are continuously introduced, WiFi-based HAR systems must adapt by learning new concepts without forgetting previously learned ones. Furthermore, retaining knowledge from old activities by storing historical exemplar is impractical for WiFi-based HAR due to privacy concerns and limited storage capacity of edge devices. In this work, we propose ConSense, a lightweight and fast-adapted exemplar-free class incremental learning framework for WiFi-based HAR. The framework leverages the transformer architecture and involves dynamic model expansion and selective retraining to preserve previously learned knowledge while integrating new information. Specifically, during incremental sessions, small-scale trainable parameters that are trained specifically on the data of each task are added in the multi-head self-attention layer. In addition, a selective retraining strategy that dynamically adjusts the weights in multilayer perceptron based on the performance stability of neurons across tasks is used. Rather than training the entire model, the proposed strategies of dynamic model expansion and selective retraining reduce the overall computational load while balancing stability on previous tasks and plasticity on new tasks. Evaluation results on three public WiFi datasets demonstrate that ConSense not only outperforms several competitive approaches but also requires fewer parameters, highlighting its practical utility in class-incremental scenarios for HAR.
title ConSense: Continually Sensing Human Activity with WiFi via Growing and Picking
topic Signal Processing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17483