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Main Authors: Wang, Yuandou, Gunnarsson, Filip, Hai, Rihan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04660
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author Wang, Yuandou
Gunnarsson, Filip
Hai, Rihan
author_facet Wang, Yuandou
Gunnarsson, Filip
Hai, Rihan
contents Tabular data streams are increasingly prevalent in real-time decision-making across healthcare, finance, and the Internet of Things, often generated and processed on resource-constrained edge and mobile devices. Continual learning (CL) enables models to learn sequentially from such streams while retaining previously acquired knowledge. While recent CL advances have made significant progress in mitigating catastrophic forgetting, the energy and memory efficiency of CL for tabular data streams remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose AttenMLP, which integrates attention-based feature replay with context retrieval and sliding buffer updates within a minibatch training framework for streaming tabular learning. We evaluate AttenMLP against state-of-the-art (SOTA) tabular models on real-world concept drift benchmarks with temporal distribution shifts. Experimental results show that AttenMLP achieves accuracy comparable to strong baselines without replay, while substantially reducing energy consumption through tunable design choices. In particular, with the proposed attention-based feature memory design, AttenMLP costs a 0.062 decrease in final accuracy under the incremental concept drift dataset, while reducing energy usage up to 33.3\% compared to TabPFNv2. Under the abrupt concept drift dataset, AttenMLP reduces 1.47\% energy consumption compared to TabR, at the cost of a 0.038 decrease in final accuracy. Although ranking third in global efficiency, AttenMLP demonstrates energy-accuracy trade-offs across both abrupt and incremental concept drift scenarios compared to SOTA tabular models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_04660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Attention-based Feature Memory Design for Energy-Efficient Continual Learning
Wang, Yuandou
Gunnarsson, Filip
Hai, Rihan
Machine Learning
Tabular data streams are increasingly prevalent in real-time decision-making across healthcare, finance, and the Internet of Things, often generated and processed on resource-constrained edge and mobile devices. Continual learning (CL) enables models to learn sequentially from such streams while retaining previously acquired knowledge. While recent CL advances have made significant progress in mitigating catastrophic forgetting, the energy and memory efficiency of CL for tabular data streams remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we propose AttenMLP, which integrates attention-based feature replay with context retrieval and sliding buffer updates within a minibatch training framework for streaming tabular learning. We evaluate AttenMLP against state-of-the-art (SOTA) tabular models on real-world concept drift benchmarks with temporal distribution shifts. Experimental results show that AttenMLP achieves accuracy comparable to strong baselines without replay, while substantially reducing energy consumption through tunable design choices. In particular, with the proposed attention-based feature memory design, AttenMLP costs a 0.062 decrease in final accuracy under the incremental concept drift dataset, while reducing energy usage up to 33.3\% compared to TabPFNv2. Under the abrupt concept drift dataset, AttenMLP reduces 1.47\% energy consumption compared to TabR, at the cost of a 0.038 decrease in final accuracy. Although ranking third in global efficiency, AttenMLP demonstrates energy-accuracy trade-offs across both abrupt and incremental concept drift scenarios compared to SOTA tabular models.
title An Attention-based Feature Memory Design for Energy-Efficient Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04660