Offline to Online Learning for Personalized Bandwidth Estimation

In this work, we tackle the problem of bandwidth estimation (BWE) for real-time communication systems through expert personalization. While expert heuristic-based methods have been widely adopted, tailoring these methods for each and every end user environment is cumbersome due to the level of domain expertise and manual effort required to adjust the carefully tuned heuristic parameters. Thus. we propose Merlin, a data-driven solution to BWE that harnesses expert demonstrations from prior heuristic-based methods to extract an expert BWE policy. The extracted policy can then be finetuned to end user network conditions to improve user quality of experience (QoE). In real-world videoconferencing calls, Merlin matches our expert's policy with no statistically significant movements in terms of objective QoE metrics. Additionally, we show that personalizing Merlin's control policy is possible through a small number of online data-driven parameter updates.