A method of improving efficiency of a vehicle behavior controller using a traffic state estimation network is described. The method includes feeding an input of a feature extraction network of the vehicle behavior controller with a sequence of images. The sequence of images include a highway section and corresponding traffic data. The method also includes disentangling an estimated behavior of a controlled ego vehicle. by the traffic state estimation network. The traffic state estimate network disentangles the estimated of the controlled ego vehicle from extracted traffic state features of the input provided by the feature extraction network. The method further includes selecting an action to adjust an autonomous behavior of the controlled ego vehicle according to the estimated behavior of the controlled ego vehicle.