Paweł Gora

Mauritz N. Cartier van Dissel, Paweł Gora, Dragoş Manea

Urban road transport is a major civilisational and economic challenge, affecting the quality of life and economic activity. Addressing these challenges requires a multidisciplinary approach and sustainable urban planning strategies to mitigate the negative effects of traffic in cities. In this paper, we introduce an extension of one of the most popular macroscopic traffic simulation models, the Payne-Whitham model. We investigate how this model, originally designed to model highway traffic on straight road segments, can be adapted to more realistic conditions with arbitrary road network graphs and multiple intersections with traffic signals. Furthermore, we showcase the practical application of this extension in experiments aimed at optimising traffic signal settings. For computational reasons, these experiments involve the adoption of surrogate models for approximating our extended Payne-Whitham model, and subsequently, we utilise the Differential Evolution optimization algorithm, resulting in the identification of traffic signal settings that enhance the average speed of cars and decrease the total length of queues, thereby facilitating smoother traffic flow.

Grzegorz Wilczyński, Rafał Tobiasz, Paweł Gora et al.

Recent advances in neural rendering, particularly 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have enabled real-time rendering of complex scenes. However, standard 3DGS relies on spherical harmonics, which often struggle to accurately capture high-frequency view-dependent effects such as sharp reflections and transparency. While hybrid approaches like Viewing Direction Gaussian Splatting (VDGS) mitigate this limitation using classical Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), they remain limited by the expressivity of classical networks in low-parameter regimes. In this paper, we introduce QuantumGS, a novel hybrid framework that integrates Variational Quantum Circuits (VQC) into the Gaussian Splatting pipeline. We propose a unique encoding strategy that maps the viewing direction directly onto the Bloch sphere, leveraging the natural geometry of qubits to represent 3D directional data. By replacing classical color-modulating networks with quantum circuits generated via a hypernetwork or conditioning mechanism, we achieve higher expressivity and better generalization. Source code is available in the supplementary material. Code is available at https://github.com/gwilczynski95/QuantumGS

Ahmet Onur Akman, Anastasia Psarou, Michał Hoffmann et al.

Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) promise to reduce congestion in future urban networks, potentially by optimizing their routing decisions. Unlike for human drivers, these decisions can be made with collective, data-driven policies, developed using machine learning algorithms. Reinforcement learning (RL) can facilitate the development of such collective routing strategies, yet standardized and realistic benchmarks are missing. To that end, we present URB: Urban Routing Benchmark for RL-equipped Connected Autonomous Vehicles. URB is a comprehensive benchmarking environment that unifies evaluation across 29 real-world traffic networks paired with realistic demand patterns. URB comes with a catalog of predefined tasks, multi-agent RL (MARL) algorithm implementations, three baseline methods, domain-specific performance metrics, and a modular configuration scheme. Our results show that, despite the lengthy and costly training, state-of-the-art MARL algorithms rarely outperformed humans. The experimental results reported in this paper initiate the first leaderboard for MARL in large-scale urban routing optimization. They reveal that current approaches struggle to scale, emphasizing the urgent need for advancements in this domain.

Szymon Jakubicz, Karol Kuźniak, Jan Wawszczak et al.

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) methods have emerged as a promising approach for solving combinatorial problems. Among RL-based models, POMO has demonstrated strong performance on a variety of tasks, including variants of the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). However, there is room for improvement for these tasks. In this work, we improved POMO, creating a method (\textbf{POMO+}) that leverages the initial nodes to find a solution in a more informed way. We ran experiments on our new model and observed that our solution converges faster and achieves better results. We validated our models on the CVRPLIB dataset and noticed improvements in problem instances with up to 100 customers. We hope that our research in this project can lead to further advancements in the field.

Witold Szejgis, Anna Warno, Paweł Gora

We present a method for approximating outcomes of road traffic simulations using BERT-based models, which may find applications in, e.g., optimizing traffic signal settings, especially with the presence of autonomous and connected vehicles. The experiments were conducted on a dataset generated using the Traffic Simulation Framework software runs on a realistic road network. The BERT-based models were compared with 4 other types of machine learning models (LightGBM, fully connected neural networks and 2 types of graph neural networks) and gave the best results in terms of all the considered metrics.

Paweł Gora, Maciej Brzeski, Marcin Możejko et al.

We analyze the accuracy of traffic simulations metamodels based on neural networks and gradient boosting models (LightGBM), applied to traffic optimization as fitness functions of genetic algorithms. Our metamodels approximate outcomes of traffic simulations (the total time of waiting on a red signal) taking as an input different traffic signal settings, in order to efficiently find (sub)optimal settings. Their accuracy was proven to be very good on randomly selected test sets, but it turned out that the accuracy may drop in case of settings expected (according to genetic algorithms) to be close to local optima, which makes the traffic optimization process more difficult. In this work, we investigate 16 different metamodels and 20 settings of genetic algorithms, in order to understand what are the reasons of this phenomenon, what is its scale, how it can be mitigated and what can be potentially done to design better real-time traffic optimization methods.