Smart Multi-Scenario Task Deployment for AUV Cluster Network: A Large Language Model-Driven Exploration-Enhanced MARL Approach

Recent advances in network technologies and Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have accelerated the development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) cluster networks, enabling intelligent applications such as target tracking and cooperative target encirclement. However, existing MARL models are typically designed for single-task scenarios, limiting their scalability in real-world multi-task environments. To ad dress this, we propose a lightweight MARL framework capable of handling multiple AUV tasks with reduced reliance on underwater sampling. Specifically, a unified state space representation is constructed to support task generalization, while a hybrid online offline MARL training paradigm is introduced by leveraging the logical reasoning and sample generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). This reduces the demand for real-time data collection. Furthermore, a supervised pretraining strategy is incorporated to improve convergence and learning stability. Based on these components, we develop the Large Language Model-driven Hybrid online-offline MARL algorithm towards Multi-Task scenarios (LLM-HMT), which supports intelligent deployment of multi-task AUV cluster systems with minimal state representation, reduced sample requirements, and limited training iterations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLM HMT outperforms mainstream MARL baselines in convergence speed, task success rate, and resource efficiency, highlighting its potential for practical underwater applications.