Quality-aware Neural Adaptive Video Streaming with Lifelong Imitation Learning

Existing Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) algorithms pick future video chunks’ bitrates via fixed rules or offline trained models to ensure good quality of experience (QoE) for Internet video. Nevertheless, data analysis demonstrates that a good ABR algorithm is required to continually and fast update for adapting itself to time-varying network conditions. Therefore, we propose Comyco, a video quality-aware learning-based ABR approach that enormously improves recent schemes by i) picking the chunk with higher perceptual video qualities rather than video bitrates; ii) training the policy via imitating expert trajectories given by the expert strategy; iii) employing the lifelong learning method to continually train the model w.r.t the fresh trace collected by the users. To achieve this, we develop a complete quality-aware lifelong imitation learning-based ABR system, construct quality-based neural network architecture, collect a quality-driven video dataset, and estimate QoE metrics with video quality features. Using trace-driven and real-world experiments, we demonstrate Comyco reaches 1700-fold improvements in the number of samples required and 16-fold speedup in the training time compared with the prior work. Meanwhile, Comyco outperforms existing methods, with the improvements on average QoE of 7.5%–16.79%. Moreover, experimental results on continual training also illustrate that lifelong learning helps Comyco further improve the average QoE of 1.07%–9.81% in comparison to the offline trained model.