GuideLight: "Industrial Solution" Guidance for More Practical Traffic Signal Control Agents

Currently, traffic signal control (TSC) methods based on reinforcement learning (RL) have proven superior to traditional methods. However, most RL methods face difficulties when applied in the real world due to three factors: input, output, and the cycle-flow relation. The industry's observable input is much more limited than simulation-based RL methods. For real-world solutions, only flow can be reliably collected, whereas common RL methods need more. For the output action, most RL methods focus on acyclic control, which real-world signal controllers do not support. Most importantly, industry standards require a consistent cycle-flow relationship: non-decreasing and different response strategies for low, medium, and high-level flows, which is ignored by the RL methods. To narrow the gap between RL methods and industry standards, we innovatively propose to use industry solutions to guide the RL agent. Specifically, we design behavior cloning and curriculum learning to guide the agent to mimic and meet industry requirements and, at the same time, leverage the power of exploration and exploitation in RL for better performance. We theoretically prove that such guidance can largely decrease the sample complexity to polynomials in the horizon when searching for an optimal policy. Our rigid experiments show that our method has good cycle-flow relation and superior performance.

CoSLight: Co-optimizing Collaborator Selection and Decision-making to Enhance Traffic Signal Control

Effective multi-intersection collaboration is pivotal for reinforcement-learning-based traffic signal control to alleviate congestion. Existing work mainly chooses neighboring intersections as collaborators. However, quite an amount of congestion, even some wide-range congestion, is caused by non-neighbors failing to collaborate. To address these issues, we propose to separate the collaborator selection as a second policy to be learned, concurrently being updated with the original signal-controlling policy. Specifically, the selection policy in real-time adaptively selects the best teammates according to phase- and intersection-level features. Empirical results on both synthetic and real-world datasets provide robust validation for the superiority of our approach, offering significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/AnonymousAccountss/CoSLight.

Learning Causal Dynamics Models in Object-Oriented Environments

Causal dynamics models (CDMs) have demonstrated significant potential in addressing various challenges in reinforcement learning. To learn CDMs, recent studies have performed causal discovery to capture the causal dependencies among environmental variables. However, the learning of CDMs is still confined to small-scale environments due to computational complexity and sample efficiency constraints. This paper aims to extend CDMs to large-scale object-oriented environments, which consist of a multitude of objects classified into different categories. We introduce the Object-Oriented CDM (OOCDM) that shares causalities and parameters among objects belonging to the same class. Furthermore, we propose a learning method for OOCDM that enables it to adapt to a varying number of objects. Experiments on large-scale tasks indicate that OOCDM outperforms existing CDMs in terms of causal discovery, prediction accuracy, generalization, and computational efficiency.

Hummer: Towards Limited Competitive Preference Dataset

Preference datasets are essential for incorporating human preferences into pre-trained language models, playing a key role in the success of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. However, these datasets often demonstrate conflicting alignment objectives, leading to increased vulnerability to jailbreak attacks and challenges in adapting downstream tasks to prioritize specific alignment objectives without negatively impacting others. In this work, we introduce a novel statistical metric, Alignment Dimension Conflict, to quantify the degree of conflict within preference datasets. We then present \texttt{Hummer} and its fine-grained variant, \texttt{Hummer-F}, as innovative pairwise preference datasets with reduced-conflict alignment objectives. \texttt{Hummer} is built based on UltraFeedback and is enhanced by AI feedback from GPT-4, marking as the first preference dataset aimed at reducing the competition between alignment objectives. Furthermore, we develop reward models, HummerRM and HummerRM-F, which employ a hybrid sampling approach to balance diverse alignment objectives effectively. This sampling method positions HummerRM as an ideal model for domain-specific further fine-tuning and reducing vulnerabilities to attacks.

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

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.

DuaLight: Enhancing Traffic Signal Control by Leveraging Scenario-Specific and Scenario-Shared Knowledge

Reinforcement learning has been revolutionizing the traditional traffic signal control task, showing promising power to relieve congestion and improve efficiency. However, the existing methods lack effective learning mechanisms capable of absorbing dynamic information inherent to a specific scenario and universally applicable dynamic information across various scenarios. Moreover, within each specific scenario, they fail to fully capture the essential empirical experiences about how to coordinate between neighboring and target intersections, leading to sub-optimal system-wide outcomes. Viewing these issues, we propose DuaLight, which aims to leverage both the experiential information within a single scenario and the generalizable information across various scenarios for enhanced decision-making. Specifically, DuaLight introduces a scenario-specific experiential weight module with two learnable parts: Intersection-wise and Feature-wise, guiding how to adaptively utilize neighbors and input features for each scenario, thus providing a more fine-grained understanding of different intersections. Furthermore, we implement a scenario-shared Co-Train module to facilitate the learning of generalizable dynamics information across different scenarios. Empirical results on both real-world and synthetic scenarios show DuaLight achieves competitive performance across various metrics, offering a promising solution to alleviate traffic congestion, with 3-7\% improvements. The code is available under: https://github.com/lujiaming-12138/DuaLight.

Learning Top-k Subtask Planning Tree based on Discriminative Representation Pre-training for Decision Making

Many complicated real-world tasks can be broken down into smaller, more manageable parts, and planning with prior knowledge extracted from these simplified pieces is crucial for humans to make accurate decisions. However, replicating this process remains a challenge for AI agents and naturally raises two questions: How to extract discriminative knowledge representation from priors? How to develop a rational plan to decompose complex problems? Most existing representation learning methods employing a single encoder structure are fragile and sensitive to complex and diverse dynamics. To address this issue, we introduce a multiple-encoder and individual-predictor regime to learn task-essential representations from sufficient data for simple subtasks. Multiple encoders can extract adequate task-relevant dynamics without confusion, and the shared predictor can discriminate the task characteristics. We also use the attention mechanism to generate a top-k subtask planning tree, which customizes subtask execution plans in guiding complex decisions on unseen tasks. This process enables forward-looking and globality by flexibly adjusting the depth and width of the planning tree. Empirical results on a challenging platform composed of some basic simple tasks and combinatorially rich synthetic tasks consistently outperform some competitive baselines and demonstrate the benefits of our design.

Controlling Large Language Model-based Agents for Large-Scale Decision-Making: An Actor-Critic Approach

The significant advancements in large language models (LLMs) have presented novel opportunities for tackling planning and decision-making within multi-agent systems. However, as the number of agents increases, the issues of hallucination in LLMs and coordination in multi-agent systems (MAS) have become increasingly pronounced. Additionally, the efficient utilization of tokens becomes a critical consideration when employing LLMs to facilitate the interactions of large numbers of agents. In this paper, we present a novel framework aimed at enhancing coordination and decision-making capabilities of LLMs within large-scale multi-agent environments. Our approach draws inspiration from the actor-critic framework employed in multi-agent reinforcement learning, and we develop a modular and token-efficient solution that effectively addresses challenges presented by LLMs and MAS. Through evaluations conducted in experiments involving system resource allocation and robot grid transportation, we demonstrate the considerable advantages afforded by our proposed approach.

TPTU-v2: Boosting Task Planning and Tool Usage of Large Language Model-based Agents in Real-world Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in addressing tasks that necessitate a combination of task planning and the usage of external tools that require a blend of task planning and the utilization of external tools, such as APIs. However, real-world complex systems present three prevalent challenges concerning task planning and tool usage: (1) The real system usually has a vast array of APIs, so it is impossible to feed the descriptions of all APIs to the prompt of LLMs as the token length is limited; (2) the real system is designed for handling complex tasks, and the base LLMs can hardly plan a correct sub-task order and API-calling order for such tasks; (3) Similar semantics and functionalities among APIs in real systems create challenges for both LLMs and even humans in distinguishing between them. In response, this paper introduces a comprehensive framework aimed at enhancing the Task Planning and Tool Usage (TPTU) abilities of LLM-based agents operating within real-world systems. Our framework comprises three key components designed to address these challenges: (1) the API Retriever selects the most pertinent APIs for the user task among the extensive array available; (2) LLM Finetuner tunes a base LLM so that the finetuned LLM can be more capable for task planning and API calling; (3) the Demo Selector adaptively retrieves different demonstrations related to hard-to-distinguish APIs, which is further used for in-context learning to boost the final performance. We validate our methods using a real-world commercial system as well as an open-sourced academic dataset, and the outcomes clearly showcase the efficacy of each individual component as well as the integrated framework.

Reboost Large Language Model-based Text-to-SQL, Text-to-Python, and Text-to-Function -- with Real Applications in Traffic Domain

The previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) method achieved a remarkable execution accuracy on the Spider dataset, which is one of the largest and most diverse datasets in the Text-to-SQL domain. However, during our reproduction of the business dataset, we observed a significant drop in performance. We examined the differences in dataset complexity, as well as the clarity of questions' intentions, and assessed how those differences could impact the performance of prompting methods. Subsequently, We develop a more adaptable and more general prompting method, involving mainly query rewriting and SQL boosting, which respectively transform vague information into exact and precise information and enhance the SQL itself by incorporating execution feedback and the query results from the database content. In order to prevent information gaps, we include the comments, value types, and value samples for columns as part of the database description in the prompt. Our experiments with Large Language Models (LLMs) illustrate the significant performance improvement on the business dataset and prove the substantial potential of our method. In terms of execution accuracy on the business dataset, the SOTA method scored 21.05, while our approach scored 65.79. As a result, our approach achieved a notable performance improvement even when using a less capable pre-trained language model. Last but not least, we also explore the Text-to-Python and Text-to-Function options, and we deeply analyze the pros and cons among them, offering valuable insights to the community.