English

Safe Urban Traffic Control via Uncertainty-Aware Conformal Prediction and World-Model Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2026-02-05 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Urban traffic management demands systems that simultaneously predict future conditions, detect anomalies, and take safe corrective actions -- all while providing reliability guarantees. We present STREAM-RL, a unified framework that introduces three novel algorithmic contributions: (1) PU-GAT+, an Uncertainty-Guided Adaptive Conformal Forecaster that uses prediction uncertainty to dynamically reweight graph attention via confidence-monotonic attention, achieving distribution-free coverage guarantees; (2) CRFN-BY, a Conformal Residual Flow Network that models uncertainty-normalized residuals via normalizing flows with Benjamini-Yekutieli FDR control under arbitrary dependence; and (3) LyCon-WRL+, an Uncertainty-Guided Safe World-Model RL agent with Lyapunov stability certificates, certified Lipschitz bounds, and uncertainty-propagated imagination rollouts. To our knowledge, this is the first framework to propagate calibrated uncertainty from forecasting through anomaly detection to safe policy learning with end-to-end theoretical guarantees. Experiments on multiple real-world traffic trajectory data demonstrate that STREAM-RL achieves 91.4\% coverage efficiency, controls FDR at 4.1\% under verified dependence, and improves safety rate to 95.2\% compared to 69\% for standard PPO while achieving higher reward, with 23ms end-to-end inference latency.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.04821,
  title  = {Safe Urban Traffic Control via Uncertainty-Aware Conformal Prediction and World-Model Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Joydeep Chandra and Satyam Kumar Navneet and Aleksandr Algazinov and Yong Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.04821},
  year   = {2026}
}