Online Model Adaptation with Feedforward Compensation

Abstract

To cope with distribution shifts or non-stationarity in system dynamics, online adaptation algorithms have been introduced to update offline-learned prediction models in real-time. Existing online adaptation methods focus on optimizing the prediction model by utilizing feedback from the latest prediction error. Unfortunately, this feedback-based approach is susceptible to forgetting past information. This work proposes an online adaptation method with feedforward compensation, which uses critical data samples from a memory buffer, instead of the latest samples, to optimize the prediction model. We prove that the proposed approach achieves a smaller error bound compared to previously utilized methods in slow time-varying systems. We conducted experiments on several prediction tasks, which clearly illustrate the superiority of the proposed feedforward adaptation method. Furthermore, our feedforward adaptation technique is capable of estimating an uncertainty bound for predictions.