TFGI: a continual learning framework for remaining useful life prediction based on temporal fusion model
摘要
Many studies have focused on remaining useful life (RUL) prediction via continual learning. This approach involves learning degradation patterns from different datasets in multi-stages to achieve reliable and accurate results. However, existing research faces two key issues: catastrophic forgetting (losing prior knowledge) and plasticity loss (diminished capacity to learn new information) after multi-stage learning. To simultaneously mitigate both issues in RUL prediction, we introduce TFGI, a framework that integrates adaptive bidirectional feature fusion, dynamic plasticity preservation, and time-frequency joint learning, which is designed with inherent parallelism to support efficient execution on high-performance computing (HPC) platforms. In TFGI, the input data are preprocessed by a time-frequency joint learning mechanism. This mechanism exploits the butterfly-operation parallelism of FFT and enhances the model’s sensitivity to multi-stage degradation patterns. Unlike existing methods that focus solely on regularization or replay strategies, TFGI introduces a temporal-aware gating mechanism. This mechanism adaptively balances bidirectional feature extraction, BiGRU captures short-term local degradation via gated memory, while Informer isolates long-term global precursors via ProbSparse attention. Furthermore, we implement a dynamic plasticity preservation mechanism to mitigate plasticity loss during training using a continual backpropagation algorithm. Its neuron-wise utility computations are trivially data-parallel, which makes the training scalable across GPU devices. Our framework improves RUL prediction accuracy when compared with several state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on a rolling bearing run-to-failure dataset. Its parallel dual-path design, combined with O(L ln L) complexity attention, makes it a promising candidate for real-time RUL prediction on HPC systems, aligning well with the scope of supercomputing research.