English

Neural ODE Control for Trajectory Approximation of Continuity Equation

Optimization and Control 2022-05-20 v1 Machine Learning Systems and Control Systems and Control

Abstract

We consider the controllability problem for the continuity equation, corresponding to neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), which describes how a probability measure is pushedforward by the flow. We show that the controlled continuity equation has very strong controllability properties. Particularly, a given solution of the continuity equation corresponding to a bounded Lipschitz vector field defines a trajectory on the set of probability measures. For this trajectory, we show that there exist piecewise constant training weights for a neural ODE such that the solution of the continuity equation corresponding to the neural ODE is arbitrarily close to it. As a corollary to this result, we establish that the continuity equation of the neural ODE is approximately controllable on the set of compactly supported probability measures that are absolutely continuous with respect to the Lebesgue measure.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.09241,
  title  = {Neural ODE Control for Trajectory Approximation of Continuity Equation},
  author = {Karthik Elamvazhuthi and Bahman Gharesifard and Andrea Bertozzi and Stanley Osher},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.09241},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:21:42.098Z