Multi-Agent Conditional Diffusion Model with Mean Field Communication as Wireless Resource Allocation Planner

TL;DR

This paper introduces a multi-agent diffusion model framework for decentralized wireless resource allocation, leveraging mean-field communication to improve stability, scalability, and performance in large-scale networks.

Contribution

It proposes the MA-CDMP framework combining diffusion models with mean-field mechanisms for efficient multi-agent wireless resource management.

Findings

Outperforms existing MARL methods in reward and QoS metrics.

Provides theoretical guarantees on distributional approximation error.

Demonstrates scalability and effectiveness in large-scale wireless networks.

Abstract

In wireless communication systems, efficient and adaptive resource allocation plays a crucial role in enhancing overall Quality of Service (QoS). Compared to the conventional Model-Free Reinforcement Learning (MFRL) scheme, Model-Based RL (MBRL) first learns a generative world model for subsequent planning. The reuse of historical experience in MBRL promises more stable training behavior, yet its deployment in large-scale wireless networks remains challenging due to high-dimensional stochastic dynamics, strong inter-agent cooperation, and communication constraints. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Multi-Agent Conditional Diffusion Model Planner (MA-CDMP) for decentralized communication resource management. Built upon the Distributed Training with Decentralized Execution (DTDE) paradigm, MA-CDMP models each communication node as an autonomous agent and employs Diffusion Models (DMs) to capture and predict environment dynamics. Meanwhile, an inverse dynamics model guides action generation, thereby enhancing sample efficiency and policy scalability. Moreover, to approximate large-scale agent interactions, a Mean-Field (MF) mechanism is introduced as an assistance to the classifier in DMs. This design mitigates inter-agent non-stationarity and enhances cooperation with minimal communication overhead in distributed settings. We further theoretically establish an upper bound on the distributional approximation error introduced by the MF-based diffusion generation, guaranteeing convergence stability and reliable modeling of multi-agent stochastic dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MA-CDMP consistently outperforms existing MARL baselines in terms of average reward and QoS metrics, showcasing its scalability and practicality for real-world wireless network optimization.