English

Spatiotemporal Decision Transformer for Traffic Coordination

Machine Learning 2026-02-04 v1 Artificial Intelligence Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

Traffic signal control is a critical challenge in urban transportation, requiring coordination among multiple intersections to optimize network-wide traffic flow. While reinforcement learning has shown promise for adaptive signal control, existing methods struggle with multi-agent coordination and sample efficiency. We introduce MADT (Multi-Agent Decision Transformer), a novel approach that reformulates multi-agent traffic signal control as a sequence modeling problem. MADT extends the Decision Transformer paradigm to multi-agent settings by incorporating: (1) a graph attention mechanism for modeling spatial dependencies between intersections, (2) a|temporal transformer encoder for capturing traffic dynamics, and (3) return-to-go conditioning for target performance specification. Our approach enables offline learning from historical traffic data, with architecture design that facilitates potential online fine-tuning. Experiments on synthetic grid networks and real-world traffic scenarios demonstrate that MADT achieves state-of-the-art performance, reducing average travel time by 5-6% compared to the strongest baseline while exhibiting superior coordination among adjacent intersections.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.02903,
  title  = {Spatiotemporal Decision Transformer for Traffic Coordination},
  author = {Haoran Su and Yandong Sun and Hanxiao Deng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.02903},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:33:10.592Z