English

On the Hardness of Learning to Stabilize Linear Systems

Systems and Control 2023-11-21 v1 Machine Learning Systems and Control Machine Learning

Abstract

Inspired by the work of Tsiamis et al. \cite{tsiamis2022learning}, in this paper we study the statistical hardness of learning to stabilize linear time-invariant systems. Hardness is measured by the number of samples required to achieve a learning task with a given probability. The work in \cite{tsiamis2022learning} shows that there exist system classes that are hard to learn to stabilize with the core reason being the hardness of identification. Here we present a class of systems that can be easy to identify, thanks to a non-degenerate noise process that excites all modes, but the sample complexity of stabilization still increases exponentially with the system dimension. We tie this result to the hardness of co-stabilizability for this class of systems using ideas from robust control.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2311.11151,
  title  = {On the Hardness of Learning to Stabilize Linear Systems},
  author = {Xiong Zeng and Zexiang Liu and Zhe Du and Necmiye Ozay and Mario Sznaier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.11151},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

7 pages, 2 figures, accepted by CDC 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:25:09.871Z