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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14532 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14532/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [The Surprising Effectiveness of PPO in Cooperative, Multi-Agent Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.01955/) (2021)
- [CoLight: Learning Network-level Cooperation for Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05717/) (2019)
- [Learning Phase Competition for Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04722/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Traffic Signal Control Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08117/) (2019)
- [AttendLight: Universal Attention-Based Reinforcement Learning Model for Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05772/) (2020)
- [Learning an Interpretable Traffic Signal Control Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11023/) (2019)
- [InTAS -- The Ingolstadt Traffic Scenario for SUMO](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.11995/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [X-Light: Cross-City Traffic Signal Control Using Transformer on Transformer as Meta Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12090/) (2024)
- [Knowing What Not to Do: Leverage Language Model Insights for Action Space Pruning in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16854/) (2024)
- [Skin Cancer Detection utilizing Deep Learning: Classification of Skin Lesion Images using a Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18554/) (2024)
- [FuzzyLight: A Robust Two-Stage Fuzzy Approach for Traffic Signal Control Works in Real Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15820/) (2025)
- [Unicorn: A Universal and Collaborative Reinforcement Learning Approach Towards Generalizable Network-Wide Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11488/) (2025)
- [GuideLight: "Industrial Solution" Guidance for More Practical Traffic Signal Control Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10811/) (2024)
- [LATS: Large Language Model Assisted Teacher-Student Framework for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24361/) (2026)
- [Exploring Genre and Success Classification through Song Lyrics using DistilBERT: A Fun NLP Venture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21068/) (2024)
- [A Parallel Hybrid Action Space Reinforcement Learning Model for Real-world Adaptive Traffic Signal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14250/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.