Quantifying Distribution Shift in Traffic Signal Control with Histogram-Based GEH Distance

Traffic signal control algorithms are vulnerable to distribution shift, where performance degrades under traffic conditions that differ from those seen during design or training. This paper introduces a principled approach to quantify distribution shift by representing traffic scenarios as demand histograms and comparing them with a GEH-based distance function. The method is policy-independent, interpretable, and leverages a widely used traffic engineering statistic. We validate the approach on 20 simulated scenarios using both a NEMA actuated controller and a reinforcement learning controller (FRAP++). Results show that larger scenario distances consistently correspond to increased travel time and reduced throughput, with particularly strong explanatory power for learning-based control. Overall, this method can predict performance degradation under distribution shift better than previously published techniques. These findings highlight the utility of the proposed framework for benchmarking, training regime design, and monitoring in adaptive traffic signal control.

The Distribution Shift Problem in Transportation Networks using Reinforcement Learning and AI

The use of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in smart transportation networks has increased significantly in the last few years. Among these ML and AI approaches, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be a very promising approach by several authors. However, a problem with using Reinforcement Learning in Traffic Signal Control is the reliability of the trained RL agents due to the dynamically changing distribution of the input data with respect to the distribution of the data used for training. This presents a major challenge and a reliability problem for the trained network of AI agents and could have very undesirable and even detrimental consequences if a suitable solution is not found. Several researchers have tried to address this problem using different approaches. In particular, Meta Reinforcement Learning (Meta RL) promises to be an effective solution. In this paper, we evaluate and analyze a state-of-the-art Meta RL approach called MetaLight and show that, while under certain conditions MetaLight can indeed lead to reasonably good results, under some other conditions it might not perform well (with errors of up to 22%), suggesting that Meta RL schemes are often not robust enough and can even pose major reliability problems.