TrafficClaw: Generalizable Urban Traffic Control via Unified Physical Environment Modeling

TL;DR

TrafficClaw introduces a unified physical environment for urban traffic control, enabling cross-system coordination and improved generalization through an integrated RL and LLM-based framework.

Contribution

It presents a novel unified environment model and an LLM agent for system-aware, transferable urban traffic management, addressing limitations of isolated task approaches.

Findings

Achieves robust performance across unseen traffic scenarios.

Enables explicit modeling of cross-subsystem interactions.

Supports continual strategy refinement and diagnostics.

Abstract

Urban traffic control is a system-level coordination problem spanning heterogeneous subsystems, including traffic signals, freeways, public transit, and taxi services. Existing optimization-based, reinforcement learning (RL), and emerging LLM-based approaches are largely designed for isolated tasks, limiting both cross-task generalization and the ability to capture coupled physical dynamics across subsystems. We argue that effective system-level control requires a unified physical environment in which subsystems share infrastructure, mobility demand, and spatiotemporal constraints, allowing local interventions to propagate through the network. To this end, we propose TrafficClaw, a framework for general urban traffic control built upon a unified runtime environment. TrafficClaw integrates heterogeneous subsystems into a shared dynamical system, enabling explicit modeling of cross-subsystem interactions and closed-loop agent-environment feedback. Within this environment, we develop an LLM agent with executable spatiotemporal reasoning and reusable procedural memory, supporting unified diagnostics across subsystems and continual strategy refinement. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-stage training pipeline with supervised initialization and agentic RL with system-level optimization, further enabling coordinated and system-aware performance. Experiments demonstrate that TrafficClaw achieves robust, transferable, and system-aware performance across unseen traffic scenarios, dynamics, and task configurations. Our project is available at https://github.com/usail-hkust/TrafficClaw.