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Enterprise AI Analysis: Balancing Multiple Objectives in Urban Traffic Control with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback

Reinforcement Learning

Balancing Multiple Objectives in Urban Traffic Control with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback

Reward design has been one of the central challenges for real world reinforcement learning (RL) deployment, especially in settings with multiple objectives. Preference-based RL offers an appealing alternative by learning from human preferences over pairs of behavioural outcomes. More recently, RL from AI feedback (RLAIF) has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can generate preference labels at scale, mitigating the reliance on human annotators. However, existing RLAIF work typically focuses only on single-objective tasks, leaving the open question of how RLAIF handles systems that involve multiple objectives. In such systems trade-offs among conflicting objectives are difficult to specify, and policies risk collapsing into optimizing for a dominant goal. In this paper, we explore the extension of the RLAIF paradigm to multi-objective self-adaptive systems. We show that multi-objective RLAIF can produce policies that yield balanced trade-offs reflecting different user priorities without laborious reward engineering. We argue that integrating RLAIF into multi-objective RL offers a scalable path toward user-aligned policy learning in domains with inherently conflicting objectives.

Executive Impact Summary

Key performance indicators from our research, demonstrating the tangible benefits of AI feedback in multi-objective RL.

0 Training Effort Reduction
0 Policy Adaptation Speed
0 User Alignment Score

Deep Analysis & Enterprise Applications

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RLAIF Workflow for Multi-Objective Systems
LLM Annotation Cost
RLAIF vs. Traditional MO-RL in Traffic Control
Traffic Signal Control Application

RLAIF Workflow for Multi-Objective Systems

Policy Interacts with Environment
Transitions Stored in Replay Buffer
Segment Pairs Sampled for Annotation
LLM Generates Preference Labels (D)
Reward Model (Rψ) Updates from D
Re-scores Replay Buffer (B)
Policy (πθ) Trained with Updated B
20K Annotations per run (~$0.1 - $0.2 million tokens with gpt-4.1-nano)
RLAIF vs. Traditional MO-RL in Traffic Control
RLAIF (AI Feedback) Traditional MO-RL
  • Automated preference label generation
  • Reduced reward engineering effort
  • Adaptable to user priorities via natural language prompts
  • Handles conflicting objectives effectively
  • Scalable for complex real-world systems
  • Requires extensive manual reward engineering
  • Weight tuning often laborious and non-intuitive
  • Risk of over-optimizing dominant objectives
  • Less flexible to dynamic user intent changes
  • High computational cost for Pareto-based approaches

Traffic Signal Control Application

The RLAIF framework was successfully applied to an urban traffic signal control problem, a canonical example of a multi-objective self-adaptive system. This domain inherently involves conflicting performance metrics like traffic throughput and ecological impacts (e.g., emissions).

Key Achievement: RLAIF learned policies that produced balanced trade-offs matching desired user priorities through natural language prompts, eliminating the need for laborious reward engineering.

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