Attention-Enhanced Prompt Decision Transformers for UAV-Assisted Communications with AoI

TL;DR

This paper introduces an attention-enhanced prompt Decision Transformer (APDT) for UAV-assisted IoT networks, improving trajectory planning and user scheduling to reduce AoI and energy constraints more efficiently than traditional methods.

Contribution

The paper proposes an innovative APDT framework that integrates attention mechanisms and prompt adaptation for better scenario generalization and energy management in UAV communications.

Findings

APDT converges twice as fast as conventional DT.

APDT reduces average AoI by 8%.

The framework effectively manages long-term energy constraints.

Abstract

Decision Transformer (DT) has recently demonstrated strong generalizability in dynamic resource allocation within unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, compared to conventional deep reinforcement learning (DRL). However, its performance is hindered due to zero-padding for varying state dimensions, inability to manage long-term energy constraint, and challenges in acquiring expert samples for few-shot fine-tuning in new scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose an attention-enhanced prompt Decision Transformer (APDT) framework to optimize trajectory planning and user scheduling, aiming to minimize the average age of information (AoI) under long-term energy constraint in UAV-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Specifically, we enhance the convenional DT framework by incorporating an attention mechanism to accommodate varying numbers of terrestrial users, introducing a prompt mechanism based on short trajectory demonstrations for rapid adaptation to new scenarios, and designing a token-assisted method to address the UAV's long-term energy constraint. The APDT framework is first pre-trained on offline datasets and then efficiently generalized to new scenarios. Simulations demonstrate that APDT achieves twice faster in terms of convergence rate and reduces average AoI by $8\%$ compared to conventional DT.