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Introduction to Online Control (arxiv.org)
2 points by rnjailamba on Mar 10, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A control framework where an adversary picks both the costs and the model errors, so the goal is to stay close to the best fixed policy chosen after seeing everything, rather than to beat a known offline plan. It uses step-by-step convex optimization and comes with proven bounds on both regret and computation time.

Abstract

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 and convex relaxations to obtain new methods with provable guarantees for classical settings in optimal and robust control. The primary distinction between online nonstochastic control and other frameworks is the objective. In optimal control, robust control, and other control methodologies that assume stochastic noise, the goal is to perform comparably to an offline optimal strategy. In online nonstochastic control, both the cost functions as well as the perturbations from the assumed dynamical model are chosen by an adversary. Thus the optimal policy is not defined a priori. Rather, the target is to attain low regret against the best policy in hindsight from a benchmark class of policies. This objective suggests the use of the decision making framework of online convex optimization as an algorithmic methodology. The resulting methods are based on iterative mathematical optimization algorithms, and are accompanied by finite-time regret and computational complexity guarantees.

Elad Hazan, Karan Singh
arXiv:2211.09619 · cs.LG, cs.RO, eess.SY, math.OC, stat.ML · submitted Nov 17, 2022 · updated Apr 27, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Draft; comments/suggestions welcome at [email protected]

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