Safe Urban Traffic Control via Uncertainty-Aware Conformal Prediction and World-Model Reinforcement Learning
This work addresses the problem of safe and reliable urban traffic control for city planners and autonomous systems, with incremental improvements in integrating uncertainty methods.
The paper tackles urban traffic management by developing STREAM-RL, a framework that integrates uncertainty-aware forecasting, anomaly detection, and safe reinforcement learning, achieving results such as 91.4% coverage efficiency, 4.1% FDR control, and a 95.2% safety rate.
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.