Explainable and Transferable Loss Meta-Learning for Zero-Touch Anticipatory Network Management

Abstract

Zero-touch network management is one of the most ambitious yet strongly required paradigms for beyond 5G and 6G mobile communication systems. Achieving full automation requires a closed loop that combines (i) network status data collection and processing, (ii) predictive capabilities based on such data to anticipate upcoming needs, and (iii) effective decision making that best addresses such future needs through proper network control and orchestration. Recent seminal works have proposed approaches to jointly implement the last two phases above via a single deep learning model trained on past network status to directly optimize future decisions. This is achieved by designing custom loss functions that directly embed the management task objective. Experiments with real-world measurement data have demonstrated that this strategy leads to substantial performance gains across diverse network management tasks. In this paper, we go one step beyond the loss tailoring schemes above, and introduce a loss meta-learning paradigm that (i) reduces the need for human intervention at model design stage, (ii) eases explainability and transferability of trained deep learning models for network management, and (iii) outperforms custom losses across a range of controlled experiments and practical use cases.