Concetti Chiave
A continual reinforcement learning approach that leverages forward transfer of knowledge between optimization policies with overlapping subsets of actions to learn the ultimate policy in a data-efficient task-oriented fashion, enabling a two-fold reduction in deployment lead-time compared to a reinitialize-and-retrain baseline.
Sintesi
The content presents a method for addressing the challenge of long lead-time required to deploy cell-level parameter optimization policies to new wireless network sites. The authors formulate throughput optimization as a Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) problem, where the action space (adjustable network configuration parameters) is defined as a sequence of overlapping subsets.
Key highlights:
- The proposed CRL approach leverages forward transfer of knowledge between optimization policies with overlapping action subsets to learn the ultimate policy in a data-efficient manner.
- It allows for a safe rollback to a policy of a previous subset if objective KPIs do not improve, by avoiding catastrophic forgetting.
- Simulation results demonstrate a two-fold reduction in deployment lead-time compared to a reinitialize-and-retrain baseline, without any drop in optimization gain.
- The authors address challenges such as data limitation in real wireless network trials, time constraints on policy deployment lead-time, high levels of noise in objective KPIs, and inference time constraints.
- The CRL framework is evaluated across three wireless network optimization scenarios that reflect how domain knowledge of a network operator can be leveraged to handcraft a series of configuration parameter subsets for stage-wise optimization.
Statistiche
The dataset contains 103,648 examples with 410 features, including cell-level configuration parameters, performance counters, engineering parameters, and spatio-temporal context.
The throughput time-series exhibits high levels of noise, with 49.41% ± 10.04% of the variance explained by seasonal and trend components.
Citazioni
"We formulated the problem of stage-wise optimisation of parameter subsets as a Continual Reinforcement Learning problem."
"Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate a two-fold reduction in deployment lead-time compared to a Reinitialise-and-Retrain baseline."