Offline Diffusion Policy for Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling

Zhuoran Li

doi:10.1109/tmc.2026.3689753

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Offline Diffusion Policy for Multi-User Delay-Constrained Scheduling

2026-05-01

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DOI：10.1109/tmc.2026.3689753

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Abstract

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Effective multi-user delay-constrained scheduling is crucial in various real-world applications, including embodied AI, instant messaging, live streaming, and data center management, where efficient resource allocation is required among users with diverse delay sensitivities. In these scenarios, schedulers must make real-time decisions to satisfy both delay and resource constraints without prior knowledge of system dynamics, which are often time-varying and challenging to estimate. Current learning-based methods typically require online interactions with actual systems during the training stage. Therefore, these approaches are often difficult or impractical, as they can significantly degrade system performance and incur substantial service costs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel offline reinforcement learning-based algorithm, named Scheduling By Offline Learning with Critic Guidance and Diffusion Model (SOCD), to learn efficient scheduling policies purely from pre-collected offline data. SOCD innovatively employs a diffusion policy, complemented by a sampling-free critic network for policy guidance. By integrating the Lagrangian multiplier optimization into the offline reinforcement learning, SOCD efficiently trains high-quality constraint-aware policies exclusively from available datasets, eliminating the need for online interactions with the system. Experimental results demonstrate that SOCD is resilient to various system dynamics, including partially observable and large-scale environments, and delivers superior performance compared to existing methods.

Keywords:

Delay-constrained scheduling

offline reinforcement learning

diffusion policy