Turnpike and Sparse Optimal Control for Semiautonomous Neural ODEs

Abstract

We study long-time optimal control of control-affine semiautonomous neural ordinary differential equations (SA-NODEs) with $\ell^1$-regularized controls. Three results are established. First, optimal state-control pairs satisfy an \emph{exponential turnpike property}: they remain exponentially close to a stationary optimal pair for most of the time horizon, with decay rate and prefactor independent of the horizon length $T$. Second, $\ell^1$ penalisation induces \emph{one-sided temporal sparsity}: optimal controls are active at full amplitude on an initial arc $[0,T^*]$ and vanish identically on $(T^*,T)$, where $T^*$ is independent of $T$ for $T$ large. Third, an integral turnpike estimate shows the time-averaged deviation from the stationary pair is bounded uniformly in $T$. The proofs combine dissipativity inequalities, uniform adjoint bounds via the Pontryagin optimality system, and a time-rescaling argument adapted to the semiautonomous architecture. Numerical experiments on a Duffing oscillator and a damped pendulum confirm the three-phase turnpike profile and the one-sided sparsity structure, and demonstrate a $30\times$ parameter reduction over vanilla NODEs with no loss of stabilization performance.