LANCE: Low Rank Activation Compression for Efficient On-Device Continual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Apolinario, Marco Paul E., Roy, Kaushik
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914401118846976
author Apolinario, Marco Paul E.
Roy, Kaushik
author_facet Apolinario, Marco Paul E.
Roy, Kaushik
contents On-device learning is essential for personalization, privacy, and long-term adaptation in resource-constrained environments. Achieving this requires efficient learning, both fine-tuning existing models and continually acquiring new tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Yet both settings are constrained by high memory cost of storing activations during backpropagation. Existing activation compression methods reduce this cost but rely on repeated low-rank decompositions, introducing computational overhead. Also, such methods have not been explored for continual learning. We propose LANCE (Low-rank Activation Compression), a framework that performs one-shot higher-order Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to obtain a reusable low-rank subspace for activation projection. This eliminates repeated decompositions, reducing both memory and computation. Moreover, fixed low-rank subspaces further enable on-device continual learning by allocating tasks to orthogonal subspaces without storing large task-specific matrices. Experiments show that LANCE reduces activation storage up to 250$\times$ while maintaining accuracy comparable to full backpropagation on CIFAR-10/100, Oxford-IIIT Pets, Flowers102, and CUB-200 datasets. On continual learning benchmarks (Split CIFAR-100, Split MiniImageNet, 5-Datasets), it performs competitively with orthogonal gradient projection methods at a fraction of the memory cost. These results position LANCE as a practical and scalable solution for efficient fine-tuning and continual learning on edge devices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_21617
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LANCE: Low Rank Activation Compression for Efficient On-Device Continual Learning
Apolinario, Marco Paul E.
Roy, Kaushik
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
On-device learning is essential for personalization, privacy, and long-term adaptation in resource-constrained environments. Achieving this requires efficient learning, both fine-tuning existing models and continually acquiring new tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Yet both settings are constrained by high memory cost of storing activations during backpropagation. Existing activation compression methods reduce this cost but rely on repeated low-rank decompositions, introducing computational overhead. Also, such methods have not been explored for continual learning. We propose LANCE (Low-rank Activation Compression), a framework that performs one-shot higher-order Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to obtain a reusable low-rank subspace for activation projection. This eliminates repeated decompositions, reducing both memory and computation. Moreover, fixed low-rank subspaces further enable on-device continual learning by allocating tasks to orthogonal subspaces without storing large task-specific matrices. Experiments show that LANCE reduces activation storage up to 250$\times$ while maintaining accuracy comparable to full backpropagation on CIFAR-10/100, Oxford-IIIT Pets, Flowers102, and CUB-200 datasets. On continual learning benchmarks (Split CIFAR-100, Split MiniImageNet, 5-Datasets), it performs competitively with orthogonal gradient projection methods at a fraction of the memory cost. These results position LANCE as a practical and scalable solution for efficient fine-tuning and continual learning on edge devices.
title LANCE: Low Rank Activation Compression for Efficient On-Device Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21617