Zero-Shot Adaptation for mmWave Beam-Tracking on Overhead Messenger Wires through Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning

This paper discusses the opportunity of bringing the concept of zero-shot adaptation into learning-based millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems, particularly in environments with unstable urban infrastructures. Here, zero-shot adaptation implies that a learning agent adapts to unseen scenarios during training without any adaptive fine-tuning. By considering learning-based beam-tracking of a mmWave node placed on an overhead messenger wire, we first discuss the importance of zero-shot adaptation. More specifically, we confirm that the gap between the values of wire tension and total wire mass in training and test scenarios deteriorates the beam-tracking performance in terms of the received power. Motivated by this discussion, we propose a robust beam-tracking method to adapt to a broad range of test scenarios in a zero-shot manner, i.e., without requiring any retraining to adapt the scenarios. The key idea is to leverage a recent, robust adversarial reinforcement learning technique, where such training and test gaps are regarded as disturbances from adversaries. In our case, a beam-tracking agent performs training competitively bases on an intelligent adversary who causes beam misalignments. Numerical evaluations confirm the feasibility of zero-shot adaptation by showing that the on-wire node achieves feasible beam-tracking performance without any adaptive fine-tuning in unseen scenarios.