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Related papers: The Nonstochastic Control Problem

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This text presents an introduction to an emerging paradigm in control of dynamical systems and differentiable reinforcement learning called online nonstochastic control. The new approach applies techniques from online convex optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Elad Hazan , Karan Singh

We consider a class of finite-horizon, linear-quadratic stochastic control problems, where the probability distribution governing the noise process is unknown but assumed to belong to an ambiguity set consisting of all distributions whose…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Feras Al Taha , Eilyan Bitar

Performance of adaptive control policies is assessed through the regret with respect to the optimal regulator, which reflects the increase in the operating cost due to uncertainty about the dynamics parameters. However, available results in…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2020-03-24 Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh , Ambuj Tewari , George Michailidis

In this paper, online convex optimization is applied to the problem of controlling linear dynamical systems. An algorithm similar to online gradient descent, which can handle time-varying and unknown cost functions, is proposed. Then,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-03 Marko Nonhoff , Matthias A. Müller

We study predictive control in a setting where the dynamics are time-varying and linear, and the costs are time-varying and well-conditioned. At each time step, the controller receives the exact predictions of costs, dynamics, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-22 Yiheng Lin , Yang Hu , Haoyuan Sun , Guanya Shi , Guannan Qu , Adam Wierman

We study a problem of simultaneous system identification and model predictive control of nonlinear systems. Particularly, we provide an algorithm for systems with unknown residual dynamics that can be expressed by Koopman operators. Such…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-11 Hongyu Zhou , Vasileios Tzoumas

This paper addresses the distributed online control problem over a network of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems (with possibly unknown dynamics) in the presence of adversarial perturbations. There exists a global network cost that is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-06 Ting-Jui Chang , Shahin Shahrampour

We tackle the problem of Non-stochastic Control (NSC) with the aim of obtaining algorithms whose policy regret is proportional to the difficulty of the controlled environment. Namely, we tailor the Follow The Regularized Leader (FTRL)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-24 Naram Mhaisen , George Iosifidis

We present safe control of partially-observed linear time-varying systems in the presence of unknown and unpredictable process and measurement noise. We introduce a control algorithm that minimizes dynamic regret, i.e., that minimizes the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-04-03 Hongyu Zhou , Vasileios Tzoumas

In repeated interaction problems with adaptive agents, our objective often requires anticipating and optimizing over the space of possible agent responses. We show that many problems of this form can be cast as instances of online…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 William Brown , Christos Papadimitriou , Tim Roughgarden

We study optimal regret bounds for control in linear dynamical systems under adversarially changing strongly convex cost functions, given the knowledge of transition dynamics. This includes several well studied and fundamental frameworks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-12 Naman Agarwal , Elad Hazan , Karan Singh

This work studies the problem of sequential control in an unknown, nonlinear dynamical system, where we model the underlying system dynamics as an unknown function in a known Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space. This framework yields a general…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Sham Kakade , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Kendall Lowrey , Motoya Ohnishi , Wen Sun

We present an optimisation-based method for synthesising a dynamic regret optimal controller for linear systems with potentially adversarial disturbances and known or adversarial initial conditions. The dynamic regret is defined as the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-05-31 Alexandre Didier , Jerome Sieber , Melanie N. Zeilinger

We introduce a new algorithm for online linear-quadratic control in a known system subject to adversarial disturbances. Existing regret bounds for this setting scale as $\sqrt{T}$ unless strong stochastic assumptions are imposed on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Dylan J. Foster , Max Simchowitz

Recent low-thrust space missions have highlighted the importance of designing trajectories that are robust against uncertainties. In its complete form, this process is formulated as a nonlinear constrained stochastic optimal control…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-25 Naoya Ozaki , Stefano Campagnola , Ryu Funase

We present an algorithm for robust model predictive control with consideration of uncertainty and safety constraints. Our framework considers a nonlinear dynamical system subject to disturbances from an unknown but bounded uncertainty set.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-23 Dongchan Lee , Konstantin Turitsyn , Jean-Jacques Slotine

We study the impact of predictions in online Linear Quadratic Regulator control with both stochastic and adversarial disturbances in the dynamics. In both settings, we characterize the optimal policy and derive tight bounds on the minimum…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-11 Chenkai Yu , Guanya Shi , Soon-Jo Chung , Yisong Yue , Adam Wierman

We consider the problem of finite-horizon optimal control design under uncertainty for imperfectly observed discrete-time systems with convex costs and constraints. It is known that this problem can be cast as an infinite-dimensional convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-02 Kevin J. Kircher , K. Max Zhang

This paper studies the stochastic optimal control problem for systems with unknown dynamics. First, an open-loop deterministic trajectory optimization problem is solved without knowing the explicit form of the dynamical system. Next, a…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-05-30 Dan Yu , Mohammadhussein Rafieisakhaei , Suman Chakravorty

Selecting the best hyperparameters for a particular optimization instance, such as the learning rate and momentum, is an important but nonconvex problem. As a result, iterative optimization methods such as hypergradient descent lack global…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Xinyi Chen , Elad Hazan