AIGS: Adaptive Incremental Gating System for Online Representation Learning in Non-Stationary Data Streams

Abstract

Real-time data streams in Web of Things (WoT) and edge computing environments often evolve through latent regime changes. For online representation learning under strict computational constraints, the central problem is resolving the stability-plasticity dilemma: keeping useful historical knowledge while rapidly reacting to concept drift. Existing methods employ fixed update schedules or rolling windows. However, they suffer from parameter ossification during sudden shifts and waste computational resources when the stream remains stable. This paper proposes the Adaptive Incremental Gating System (AIGS), a lightweight closed-loop state-aware adaptation framework. AIGS introduces the Shock Ratio, an endogenous residual feedback mechanism that normalizes current reconstruction error against recent variation. This signal drives a Continuous Plasticity Controller that smoothly interpolates between learning plasticity and memory retention. By treating representation learning as a closed-loop control mechanism, AIGS avoids catastrophic forgetting and maintains a strictly linear $\mathcal{O}\left(k\cdot d\right)$ per-step complexity suitable for latency-sensitive edge devices. Experiments on real-world smart city dynamic streams-spanning traffic networks, meteorological systems, and industrial infrastructure-demonstrate distinct domain-dependent advantages. On Electricity Transformer Temperature datasets, AIGS achieves preventative early-warning lead times of 8.31 (ETTm1) and 9.88 (ETTm2) steps under gradual degradation. On Performance Measurement System traffic datasets, it shows significantly faster post-shift recovery after abrupt mutations. On the highly noisy Weather dataset, it improves anomaly recall while resisting stochastic noise overfitting. These findings establish AIGS as a practical, plug-and-play adapter for resource-constrained edge monitoring systems.