eess.SYAug 28, 2026

Hybrid Offline-Online Multi-Agent Decision Transformers for Wireless Resource Management

Authors: Yiming Zhang, Kun Yang, Cong Shen, Dongning Guo

Organizations: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208 USA · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904 USA

Abstract

This paper develops a hybrid offline-online multi-agent reinforcement learning framework based on decision transformers. The policy is first pretrained offline via supervised sequence modeling of trajectories generated by existing policies, providing a safe and sample-efficient initialization. It is then fine-tuned online using a hybrid objective that incorporates critic-guided gradients, enabling performance improvements beyond the offline policy. To facilitate stable offline-to-online transfer and effective multi-agent coordination, the framework incorporates return-weighted sampling, a critic conditioned on neighbors' actions, and neighborhood-correlated exploration. The approach is fully distributed: both training and execution rely only on local observations and limited information exchange among neighboring agents. Evaluations with dynamic traffic arrivals in two settings: (i) joint scheduling and power allocation and (ii) coordinated beamforming, show that the proposed method achieves quality-of-service (QoS) performance comparable to centralized methods. Moreover, when pretrained on lower-quality datasets, online fine-tuning is also observed to surpass the initial offline policy. These results demonstrate a promising learning-based alternative for wireless resource management.

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