ReaCritic: Reasoning Transformer-based DRL Critic-model Scaling For Wireless Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: You, Feiran, Du, Hongyang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author You, Feiran
Du, Hongyang
author_facet You, Feiran
Du, Hongyang
contents Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) pose critical challenges for intelligent management due to the diverse user requirements and time-varying wireless conditions. These factors introduce significant decision complexity, which limits the adaptability of existing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods. In many DRL algorithms, especially those involving value-based or actor-critic structures, the critic component plays a key role in guiding policy learning by estimating value functions. However, conventional critic models often use shallow architectures that map observations directly to scalar estimates, limiting their ability to handle multi-task complexity. In contrast, recent progress in inference-time scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown that generating intermediate reasoning steps can significantly improve decision quality. Motivated by this, we propose ReaCritic, a reasoning transformer-based critic-model scaling scheme that brings reasoning-like ability into DRL. ReaCritic performs horizontal reasoning over parallel state-action inputs and vertical reasoning through deep transformer stacks. It is compatible with a broad range of value-based and actor-critic DRL algorithms and enhances generalization in dynamic wireless environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReaCritic improves convergence speed and final performance across various HetNet settings and standard OpenAI Gym control tasks. The code of ReaCritic is available at https://github.com/NICE-HKU/ReaCritic.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle ReaCritic: Reasoning Transformer-based DRL Critic-model Scaling For Wireless Networks
You, Feiran
Du, Hongyang
Machine Learning
Networking and Internet Architecture
Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) pose critical challenges for intelligent management due to the diverse user requirements and time-varying wireless conditions. These factors introduce significant decision complexity, which limits the adaptability of existing Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods. In many DRL algorithms, especially those involving value-based or actor-critic structures, the critic component plays a key role in guiding policy learning by estimating value functions. However, conventional critic models often use shallow architectures that map observations directly to scalar estimates, limiting their ability to handle multi-task complexity. In contrast, recent progress in inference-time scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown that generating intermediate reasoning steps can significantly improve decision quality. Motivated by this, we propose ReaCritic, a reasoning transformer-based critic-model scaling scheme that brings reasoning-like ability into DRL. ReaCritic performs horizontal reasoning over parallel state-action inputs and vertical reasoning through deep transformer stacks. It is compatible with a broad range of value-based and actor-critic DRL algorithms and enhances generalization in dynamic wireless environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReaCritic improves convergence speed and final performance across various HetNet settings and standard OpenAI Gym control tasks. The code of ReaCritic is available at https://github.com/NICE-HKU/ReaCritic.
title ReaCritic: Reasoning Transformer-based DRL Critic-model Scaling For Wireless Networks
topic Machine Learning
Networking and Internet Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10992