English

Variational Encrypted Model Predictive Control

Systems and Control 2026-03-23 v1 Cryptography and Security Systems and Control Optimization and Control

Abstract

We develop a variational encrypted model predictive control (VEMPC) protocol whose online execution relies only on encrypted polynomial operations. The proposed approach reformulates the MPC problem into a sampling-based estimator, in which the computation of the quadratic cost is naturally handled by tilting the sampling distribution, thus reducing online encrypted computation. The resulting protocol requires no additional communication rounds or intermediate decryption, and scales efficiently through two complementary levels of parallelism. We analyze the effect of encryption-induced errors on optimality, and simulation results demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed method.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.19450,
  title  = {Variational Encrypted Model Predictive Control},
  author = {Jihoon Suh and Yeongjun Jang and Junsoo Kim and Takashi Tanaka},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.19450},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Submitted to IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS) with CDC option, under review