cs.LGOct 3, 2026

Multi-Agent Spectrum Sharing

Authors: Job Elliott, Graduate Student Member, IEEE, Justin G. Metcalf, Golnaz Habibi

Abstract

This project explores how multiple cognitive radars can learn to share limited wireless spectrum with other radio users without interfering with one another. Using machine learning (ML), each device independently decides where and how widely to transmit within a fixed 100 MHz band. The system analyzes real or simulated signal activity to detect which parts of the spectrum are currently in use and which are open. Based on this information, the devices adapt their transmission choices to avoid crowded frequencies while making efficient use of available space. The goal is to develop a flexible, scalable approach to spectrum sharing that could support future wireless communication systems. Experimental results using both over-the-air software-defined radio (SDR) recordings and simulated environments demonstrate that the proposed meta-learning approach consistently balances competing objectives better than conventional reinforcement learning (RL) methods in multi-agent spectrum-sharing scenarios. Across five multi-agent benchmark environments, our proposed method achieved the highest average reward among the primary baseline algorithms while simultaneously maintaining low collision rates and stable transmission behavior.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables4 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Aug 31, 2026

SpecMind: Enabling Spectrum Intelligence via Multi-Agent Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The exponential growth of wireless devices is driving unprecedented spectrum demand, pushing spectrum management toward more fine-grained decisions across space, time, and device constraints. As a result, spectrum policymakers and engineers must process large volumes of data that come from diverse sources and take many different forms, such as text and tables. These data sources are often disaggregated and require significant time and effort to integrate, search, and interpret. Furthermore, most of this information is formatted for human understanding and is not readily accessible to automated systems. To address this challenge, we propose SpecMind, a novel Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system for spectrum intelligence that performs reasoning over heterogeneous data sources. This system enables autonomous agents to coordinate specialized sub-agents that retrieve and synthesize knowledge across policy proceedings, legal regulations, and license databases. We develop SpecBench, a question and answer (Q&A) dataset based on real-world license records and policy proceedings, addressing the lack of evaluation resources for RAG systems in the spectrum domain. Experimental results demonstrate that SpecMind outperforms traditional, general-purpose RAG systems across spectrum-related tasks, achieving over 80% win rate against strong baselines. The agent-based design enables more accurate retrieval, better contextual reasoning, and improved task completion across diverse query types.
Aug 31, 2026

WiSDoM: Wireless Sparse Decision Transformer with Mixture-of-Experts for Multi-Task Mobile Network Optimization

Emerging 6G wireless networks are expected to operate across diverse deployment scenarios, where variations in network topology, user mobility, traffic demand, and radio conditions challenge the scalability of conventional radio resource management (RRM). While offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods have demonstrated strong decision-making capabilities, learning a single policy that performs consistently across heterogeneous wireless environments remains difficult due to conflicting optimization objectives and limited model specialization. These challenges become particularly pronounced in coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission, where selecting the optimal serving-cell combination requires sequential decision-making under evolving network conditions. This paper presents the Wireless Sparse Decision Transformer with Mixture of Experts (WiSDoM), a sparse multi-task offline RL framework for adaptive multi-cell selection. WiSDoM combines Decision Transformers (DTs) with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that dynamically activates specialized experts according to task characteristics. This MoE mechanism improves model capacity without proportionally increasing inference cost, mitigates negative transfer, and enables expert specialization across tasks. WiSDoM is trained jointly on diverse network configurations spanning multiple base station and user equipment densities, mobility levels, and scheduler policies. Experimental results show that WiSDoM consistently outperforms heuristic methods, single-task models, and conventional multi-task DTs, improving quality of experience (QoE) by up to 55% while activating approximately one-third of the parameters of its dense counterpart during inference. Furthermore, WiSDoM exhibits strong task generalization and efficiently adapts to unseen wireless scenarios through few-shot prompting without retraining or fine-tuning.
Jul 3, 2026

MUTE: Return-Preserving Communication Unlearning for Efficient Multi-Agent Coordination

Inter-agent communication is critical for coordinating Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) agents under partial observability to perform effectively in cooperative games; however, real-world bandwidth constraints demand sparse interactions. Prior approaches primarily address this trade-off by optimizing information-theoretic surrogates. We argue that these statistical proxies are fundamentally misaligned with the true objective: a message can be highly informative yet irrelevant to the joint return of the task. In this work, we propose Message Unlearning for Targeted Efficiency (MUTE), a framework that views communication reduction as a value-guided machine unlearning problem. MUTE rigorously quantifies the Counterfactual Message Value using an attention-based estimator, and systematically unlearns the transmission of low-value messages from a policy trained without any communication constraints. This is achieved through a dual-objective mechanism that enforces communication sparsity while preserving the return of the original joint policy. We derive a theoretical upper bound on the performance gap induced by this sparsification, guaranteeing controlled return degradation. We also empirically evaluate MUTE on various complex multi-agent environments, achieving 80% to 90% bandwidth reduction while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art baselines.