Resilient UAV Trajectory Planning via Few-Shot Meta-Offline Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel few-shot meta-offline reinforcement learning algorithm that combines offline RL and meta-learning, enabling UAV trajectory optimization without online interaction and adapting to new environments efficiently.

Contribution

It presents a resilient, scalable RL method that trains solely on offline data and quickly adapts to unseen environments, addressing safety and scalability issues in wireless systems.

Findings

Faster convergence than baseline schemes.

Achieves optimal joint AoI and transmission power offline.

Resilient to environmental changes and network failures.

Abstract

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been a promising essence in future 5G-beyond and 6G systems. Its main advantage lies in its robust model-free decision-making in complex and large-dimension wireless environments. However, most existing RL frameworks rely on online interaction with the environment, which might not be feasible due to safety and cost concerns. Another problem with online RL is the lack of scalability of the designed algorithm with dynamic or new environments. This work proposes a novel, resilient, few-shot meta-offline RL algorithm combining offline RL using conservative Q-learning (CQL) and meta-learning using model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML). The proposed algorithm can train RL models using static offline datasets without any online interaction with the environments. In addition, with the aid of MAML, the proposed model can be scaled up to new unseen environments. We showcase the proposed algorithm for optimizing an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) 's trajectory and scheduling policy to minimize the age-of-information (AoI) and transmission power of limited-power devices. Numerical results show that the proposed few-shot meta-offline RL algorithm converges faster than baseline schemes, such as deep Q-networks and CQL. In addition, it is the only algorithm that can achieve optimal joint AoI and transmission power using an offline dataset with few shots of data points and is resilient to network failures due to unprecedented environmental changes.