Constrained Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Task Offloading in Wireless Edge Networks

Work presented at AI4NextG @ NeurIPS'25 workshop (oral presentation). The full work is available on arXiv

Abstract

In edge computing systems, autonomous agents must make fast local decisions while competing for shared resources. Existing MARL methods often resume to centralized critics or frequent communication, which fail under limited observability and communication constraints. We propose a decentralized framework in which each agent solves a constrained Markov decision process (CMDP), coordinating implicitly through a shared constraint vector. For the specific case of offloading, e.g., constraints prevent overloading shared server resources. Coordination constraints are updated infrequently and act as a lightweight coordination mechanism. They enable agents to align with global resource usage objectives but require little direct communication. Using safe reinforcement learning, agents learn policies that meet both local and global goals. We establish theoretical guarantees under mild assumptions and validate our approach experimentally, showing improved performance over centralized and independent baselines, especially in large-scale settings.

Citation

Please cite our paper as:

@misc{fox2025multiagent,
  title = {Multi-{{Agent Reinforcement Learning}} for {{Task Offloading}} in {{Wireless Edge Networks}}},
  author = {Fox, Andrea and Pellegrini, Francesco De and Altman, Eitan},
  year = {2025},
  number = {arXiv:2509.01257},
  eprint = {2509.01257},
  primaryclass = {cs},
}