Using a single actor to output personalized policy for different intersections

Abstract

Recently, with the development of Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) has achieved satisfactory results. In traffic scenarios with multiple intersections, MARL treats each intersection as an agent and optimizes traffic signal control strategies through learning and real-time decision-making. Considering that observation distributions of intersections might be different in real-world scenarios, shared parameter methods might lack diversity and thus lead to high generalization requirements in the shared-policy network. A typical solution is to increase the size of network parameters. However, simply increasing the scale of the network does not necessarily improve policy generalization, which is validated in our experiments. Accordingly, an approach that considers both the personalization of intersections and the efficiency of parameter sharing is required. To this end, we propose Hyper-Action Multi-Head Proximal Policy Optimization (HAMH-PPO), a Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE) MARL method that utilizes a shared PPO policy network to deliver personalized policies for intersections with non-iid observation distributions. The centralized critic in HAMH-PPO uses graph attention units to calculate the graph representations of all intersections and outputs a set of value estimates with multiple output heads for each intersection. The decentralized execution actor takes the local observation history as input and output distributions of action as well as a so-called hyper-action to balance the multiple values estimated from the centralized critic to further guide the updating of TSC policies. The combination of hyper-action and multi-head values enables multiple agents to share a single actor-critic while achieving personalized policies.