让交通信号灯的AI决策可解释,提升安全与可信度。
Explainable Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Traffic Signal Control

- 将路口分拆为车道实体,用注意力机制捕捉车流交互关系。
- 实测比现有方法减少更多车辆等待时间,且符合交通工程原理。
- 适合交通管理机构、城市规划者及需要可审计系统的部署场景。
强化学习在自适应交通信号控制中展现出强大能力,但其黑箱特性阻碍了交通部门的采纳与监管合规。为此,本文提出一种新型可解释的以实体为中心的强化学习框架,通过将路口观测分解为高维车道实体和相位时序配置,保留路口结构拓扑。采用双阶段注意力网络动态提取车道间依赖关系与冲突,生成实时亲和矩阵,量化信号相位对特定来向车流和排队的影响,实现可视化与可分析的解释性。同时,在近端策略优化(PPO)中集成确定性动作掩码接口,显式禁止无效相位转换,确保完全符合信号配时与安全约束。在微观仿真环境中评估表明,该方法在降低延误方面优于现有最优基线。更重要的是,涌现的注意力权重与经典交通工程原则高度一致,提供了可审计、可信任、可部署的下一代自适应信号控制架构。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for adaptive traffic signal control. However, in safety-critical infrastructure like traffic control, the opaque, black-box nature of deep RL models poses challenges for transportation agency acceptance, regulatory compliance, operational trust, troubleshooting, and fine-tuning. To bridge this gap between high-performance optimization and human-comprehensible interpretability, this effort introduces a novel, explainable entity centric RL framework for safe and transparent traffic signal control. Rather than processing traffic states through monolithic, flat vectors, the proposed architecture disaggregates real-time intersection observations into distinct, high-dimensional lane entities and phase temporal configurations to inherently preserve the structural topology and geometric configurations of the intersection. Relational dependencies and inter-lane conflicts are dynamically extracted via a dual-stage attention network featuring sequential multi-head cross-attention and self-attention blocks. This design yields a real time affinity matrix that quantifies the direct influence of signal phases on specific approach volumes and queues, providing full visual and analytical interpretability. To ensure strict operational reliability, a deterministic action-masking interface is integrated directly into the Proximal Policy Optimization pipeline, explicitly blocking invalid phase transitions to guarantee absolute compliance with established signal timing and safety constraints. Evaluated in a microscopic simulation environment, outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in delay minimization. More importantly, the emergent attention weights align precisely with established traffic engineering principles, offering an auditable, trust-enabling, and deployable architecture for next-generation adaptive traffic control systems.
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