Multi-User QoE Enhancement: Federated Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Edge Intelligence

Federated learning (FL) as a new decentralized learning/computing technique has potential advantages (e.g., accelerating computation task processing and protecting user privacy) for edge intelligence. However, due to limited computing/ caching capacities of network edges and dynamic arrivals of computation tasks, edge intelligence with FL cannot appropriately offload and effectively process computation tasks, which will degrade multi-user quality of experience (QoE). To address these challenges, it is critical to enhance the cooperation of network edges and quantify the multi-user QoE. In this article, we investigate the issue of cooperative edge intelligence by considering federated multi-agent reinforcement learning to enhance the multi-user QoE. Particularly, we present a cooperative edge intelligence architecture with vertical-horizontal cooperation supporting computation offloading. We model a comprehensive system cost to quantify the multi-user QoE and formulate the optimization problem as minimizing the expected long-term system cost. We further propose a decentralized intelligent offloading framework based on soft actor-critic and FL with an attention mechanism. Evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms existing offloading schemes in terms of convergence and multi-user QoE. Finally, we discuss several open issues and opportunities of edge intelligence with FL.