X-Light: Cross-City Traffic Signal Control Using Transformer on Transformer as Meta Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learner

X-Light: Cross-City Traffic Signal Control Using Transformer on Transformer as Meta Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learner

Haoyuan Jiang, Ziyue Li, Hua Wei, Xuantang Xiong, Jingqing Ruan, Jiaming Lu, Hangyu Mao, Rui Zhao

Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 94-102. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/11

The effectiveness of traffic light control has been significantly improved by current reinforcement learning-based approaches via better cooperation among multiple traffic lights. However, a persisting issue remains: how to obtain a multi-agent traffic signal control algorithm with remarkable transferability across diverse cities? In this paper, we propose a Transformer on Transformer (TonT) model for cross-city meta multi-agent traffic signal control, named as X-Light: We input the full Markov Decision Process trajectories, and the Lower Transformer aggregates the states, actions, rewards among the target intersection and its neighbors within a city, and the Upper Transformer learns the general decision trajectories across different cities. This dual-level approach bolsters the model's robust generalization and transferability. Notably, when directly transferring to unseen scenarios, ours surpasses all baseline methods with +7.91% on average, and even +16.3% in some cases, yielding the best results.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Applications
Machine Learning: ML: Meta-learning
Machine Learning: ML: Multi-task and transfer learning
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: MTA: Transportation