Papers › Flow: A Modular Learning Framework for Mixed Autonomy Traffic

Flow: A Modular Learning Framework for Mixed Autonomy Traffic

16 Oct 2017arXiv:1710.05465archive 2025-07-28

Cathy Wu, Aboudy Kreidieh, Kanaad Parvate, Eugene Vinitsky, Alexandre M. Bayen

The rapid development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) holds vast potential for transportation systems through improved safety, efficiency, and access to mobility. However, the progression of these impacts, as AVs are adopted, is not well understood. Numerous technical challenges arise from the goal of analyzing the partial adoption of autonomy: partial control and observation, multi-vehicle interactions, and the sheer variety of scenarios represented by real-world networks. To shed light into near-term AV impacts, this article studies the suitability of deep reinforcement learning (RL) for overcoming these challenges in a low AV-adoption regime. A modular learning framework is presented, which leverages deep RL to address complex traffic dynamics. Modules are composed to capture common traffic phenomena (stop-and-go traffic jams, lane changing, intersections). Learned control laws are found to improve upon human driving performance, in terms of system-level velocity, by up to 57% with only 4-7% adoption of AVs. Furthermore, in single-lane traffic, a small neural network control law with only local observation is found to eliminate stop-and-go traffic - surpassing all known model-based controllers to achieve near-optimal performance - and generalize to out-of-distribution traffic densities.

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16 repositories listed; official and paper-mentioned ones first.

cathywu/flow officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubMIT report
flow-project/flow officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubMIT report
DrArryYao/RL-SC mentioned on GitHubMIT report
alt113/flow-triangle-scenario mentioned on GitHubMIT report
arryyao/flow-project-flow mentioned on GitHub report
berkeleyflow/flow mentioned on GitHubMIT report
cuijiaxun/MITC-Project mentioned on GitHubMIT report
dajiangsuo/EV_mixtedAutonomy mentioned on GitHubMIT report
eugenevinitsky/cdc_bottlenecks mentioned on GitHubMIT report
leehoon7/flow mentioned on GitHubMIT report
parthjaggi/flow mentioned on GitHubMIT report
pengyuan-zhou/Multi-agent-RL-traffic-light-control mentioned on GitHubnot reachable when probed 2026-09-18 — repositories for recent papers often appear after camera-ready report
remusionita/flow_rl mentioned on GitHubMIT report
richardehughes/chnflow mentioned on GitHubMIT report

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1ran · honoured contract
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average_velocity cathywu/flow/flow/core/rewards.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 088d6832089ff160 · report
ensure_dir cathywu/flow/flow/core/util.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 3f0d8929acbc5b16 · report
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Autonomous VehiclesDeep Reinforcement LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)

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