# Planning Under Observation Mismatch for Traffic Signal Control via Adaptive Modular World Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.02548 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02548/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for autonomous driving, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 18 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jan 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for autonomous driving](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-autonomous-driving/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01643/) (2020)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08265/) (2019)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12114/) (2018)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13303/) (2020)
- [CityFlow: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Environment for Large Scale City Traffic Scenario](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05217/) (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)
- [Domain Adaptation In Reinforcement Learning Via Latent Unified State Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05714/) (2021)
- [Efficient Pressure: Improving efficiency for signalized intersections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02336/) (2021)
- [Transfer RL across Observation Feature Spaces via Model-Based Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00248/) (2022)
- [Reinforcement Learning Approaches for Traffic Signal Control under Missing Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10722/) (2023)
- [Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Signal Control through Universal Communication Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12190/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deploying learned decision-making systems often requires transferring to new sites where the sensing pipeline differs. In such cases, observations can change in semantics and dimensionality even when action primitives and objectives remain comparable. In this work, we study transferable model-based planning under this observation mismatch, which remains challenging for existing learning-based approaches. We propose Adaptive Modularized Model (AMM), a modular planning architecture that separates a domain-specific observation adapter from a shared internal dynamics model defined in a common planning state space. The dynamics model is meta-learned from multiple source domains to enable fast adaptation with limited target interaction. At run time, AMM performs receding-horizon planning by rolling out candidate action sequences under the learned dynamics and selecting actions that optimize a task-specific objective over predicted futures. We instantiate the approach on cross-domain traffic signal control, where actions correspond to signal phases and the planning objective captures congestion. Experiments show that AMM improves both performance and data efficiency compared with existing conventional controllers and learning-based baselines.