Gaoxiang Cao

2papers

2 Papers

37.6AIMar 19
Bridging Network Fragmentation: A Semantic-Augmented DRL Framework for UAV-aided VANETs

Gaoxiang Cao, Wenke Yuan, Huasen He et al.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are the digital cornerstone of autonomous driving, yet they suffer from severe network fragmentation in urban environments due to physical obstructions. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), with their high mobility, have emerged as a vital solution to bridge these connectivity gaps. However, traditional Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based UAV deployment strategies lack semantic understanding of road topology, often resulting in blind exploration and sample inefficiency. By contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) possess powerful reasoning capabilities capable of identifying topological importance, though applying them to control tasks remains challenging. To address this, we propose the Semantic-Augmented DRL (SA-DRL) framework. Firstly, we propose a fragmentation quantification method based on Road Topology Graphs (RTG) and Dual Connected Graphs (DCG). Subsequently, we design a four-stage pipeline to transform a general-purpose LLM into a domain-specific topology expert. Finally, we propose the Semantic-Augmented PPO (SA-PPO) algorithm, which employs a Logit Fusion mechanism to inject the LLM's semantic reasoning directly into the policy as a prior, effectively guiding the agent toward critical intersections. Extensive high-fidelity simulations demonstrate that SA-PPO achieves state-of-the-art performance with remarkable efficiency, reaching baseline performance levels using only 26.6% of the training episodes. Ultimately, SA-PPO improves two key connectivity metrics by 13.2% and 23.5% over competing methods, while reducing energy consumption to just 28.2% of the baseline.

76.3NIMar 19
Dynamic Mask Enhanced Intelligent Multi-UAV Deployment for Urban Vehicular Networks

Gaoxiang Cao, Wenke Yuan, Yunpeng Hou et al.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) play a crucial role in realizing vehicle-road collaboration and intelligent transportation. However, urban VANETs often face challenges such as frequent link disconnections and subnet fragmentation, which hinder reliable connectivity. To address these issues, we dynamically deploy multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as communication relays to enhance VANET. A novel Score based Dynamic Action Mask enhanced QMIX algorithm (Q-SDAM) is proposed for multi-UAV deployment, which maximizes vehicle connectivity while minimizing multi-UAV energy consumption. Specifically, we design a score-based dynamic action mask mechanism to guide UAV agents in exploring large action spaces, accelerate the learning process and enhance optimization performance. The practicality of Q-SDAM is validated using real-world datasets. We show that Q-SDAM improves connectivity by 18.2% while reducing energy consumption by 66.6% compared with existing algorithms.