Fangfang Chen

Jiao Chen, Suyan Dai, Fangfang Chen et al.

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into autonomous driving enhances personalization and adaptability in open-world scenarios. However, traditional edge computing models still face significant challenges in processing complex driving data, particularly regarding real-time performance and system efficiency. To address these challenges, this study introduces EC-Drive, a novel edge-cloud collaborative autonomous driving system with data drift detection capabilities. EC-Drive utilizes drift detection algorithms to selectively upload critical data, including new obstacles and traffic pattern changes, to the cloud for processing by GPT-4, while routine data is efficiently managed by smaller LLMs on edge devices. This approach not only reduces inference latency but also improves system efficiency by optimizing communication resource use. Experimental validation confirms the system's robust processing capabilities and practical applicability in real-world driving conditions, demonstrating the effectiveness of this edge-cloud collaboration framework. Our data and system demonstration will be released at https://sites.google.com/view/ec-drive.

Jiao Chen, Jiayi He, Fangfang Chen et al.

Industrial AI is transitioning from traditional deep learning models to large-scale transformer-based architectures, with the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) playing a pivotal role. IIoT evolves from a simple data pipeline to an intelligent infrastructure, enabling and enhancing these advanced AI systems. This survey explores the integration of IIoT with large models (LMs) and their potential applications in industrial environments. We focus on four primary types of industrial LMs: language-based, vision-based, time-series, and multimodal models. The lifecycle of LMs is segmented into four critical phases: data foundation, model training, model connectivity, and continuous evolution. First, we analyze how IIoT provides abundant and diverse data resources, supporting the training and fine-tuning of LMs. Second, we discuss how IIoT offers an efficient training infrastructure in low-latency and bandwidth-optimized environments. Third, we highlight the deployment advantages of LMs within IIoT, emphasizing IIoT's role as a connectivity nexus fostering emergent intelligence through modular design, dynamic routing, and model merging to enhance system scalability and adaptability. Finally, we demonstrate how IIoT supports continual learning mechanisms, enabling LMs to adapt to dynamic industrial conditions and ensure long-term effectiveness. This paper underscores IIoT's critical role in the evolution of industrial intelligence with large models, offering a theoretical framework and actionable insights for future research.

Jiao Chen, Jiayi He, Fangfang Chen et al.

Catastrophic forgetting remains a central challenge in continual learning (CL) with pre-trained models. While existing approaches typically freeze the backbone and fine-tune a small number of parameters to mitigate forgetting, they still rely on iterative error backpropagation and gradient-based optimization, which can be computationally intensive and less suitable for resource-constrained environments. To address this, we propose FoRo, a forward-only, gradient-free continual learning method. FoRo consists of a lightweight prompt tuning strategy and a novel knowledge encoding mechanism, both designed without modifying the pre-trained model. Specifically, prompt embeddings are inserted at the input layer and optimized using the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), which mitigates distribution shifts and extracts high-quality task representations. Subsequently, task-specific knowledge is encoded into a knowledge encoding matrix via nonlinear random projection and recursive least squares, enabling incremental updates to the classifier without revisiting prior data. Experiments show that FoRo significantly reduces average forgetting and improves accuracy. Thanks to forward-only learning, FoRo reduces memory usage and run time while maintaining high knowledge retention across long task sequences. These results suggest that FoRo could serve as a promising direction for exploring continual learning with pre-trained models, especially in real-world multimedia applications where both efficiency and effectiveness are critical.