DRL-Enabled Computation Offloading for AIGC Services in IIoT-Assisted Edge Computing Networks

The widespread application of AI-generated content (AIGC) services has driven demand for efficient computational resources, making effective task scheduling and computation offloading in edge computing (EC) environments a critical research topic. However, the high computational requirements and low latency demands of AIGC services, combined with the limitations of EC, present challenges for existing offloading methods, such as unstable decision making in dynamic task environments and resource overloading. Here, we propose a decentralized AIGC task offloading architecture within an IoT-assisted EC network to optimize the quality of AIGC services. In this architecture, we define a multiobjective joint optimization problem for AIGC task offloading, aiming to simultaneously optimize key performance metrics, such as task latency, energy efficiency, and load balancing. To address this problem, we introduce an improved proximal policy optimization (PPO)-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm, named TOPPO. By incorporating a policy update step size constraint and a clipping mechanism, TOPPO significantly enhances the stability of the training process and reduces fluctuations during policy updates. Additionally, the algorithm integrates an LSTM model to improve its ability to handle temporal dependencies. Through continuous interaction between the model and the environment, the offloading strategy is iteratively updated to ensure that diverse AIGC tasks are efficiently executed on IoT devices or edge servers. Extensive simulations and performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant improvements in task latency, energy consumption, and load management during AIGC task processing.