arXiv subjects

Daniele Martinelli

Publications and source records attributed to Daniele Martinelli.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A graph-informed regret metric for optimal distributed control

We consider the optimal control of large-scale systems using distributed controllers whose network topology mirrors the coupling graph between subsystems. In this work, we introduce spatial regret, a graph-informed metric measuring the worst-case performance gap between a distributed controller and an oracle with access to additional sensor information. The oracle's graph is a user-specified augmentation of the information graph, yielding a benchmark policy that penalizes disturbances for which additional sensing would improve performance. Minimizing spatial regret yields distributed controllers - respecting the nominal information graph - that emulate the oracle's response to disturbances characteristic of large-scale networks, such as localized perturbations. We show that minimizing spatial regret admits a convex reformulation as an infinite program with a finite-dimensional approximation. To scale to large networks, we derive an upper bound on the spatial regret that can be efficiently minimized in a distributed way. Numerical experiments on power-system models show that the resulting controllers mitigate localized disturbances more effectively than those based on classical metrics.

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arXiv2026

Data-Driven Optimal Distributed Controller Synthesis via Spatial Regret

In this paper, we present a novel method for synthesising an optimal distributed spatial regret controller using experimentally obtained frequency-response data. Spatial regret provides a measure of the performance gap between a structured distributed controller and an oracle with enhanced communication topology. We relax assumptions on the communication topology, allowing the oracle to adopt any enhanced structure. While this generalisation requires an iterative solution in place of a single convex program, we provide a tractable algorithm that synthesises optimal controllers from frequency-response data while preserving stability and the desired communication structure. Through numerical examples, we illustrate the better performance of the spatial regret controller compared to classical H2/Hinf designs, underscoring the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

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arXiv2024

Closing the Gap to Quadratic Invariance: a Regret Minimization Approach to Optimal Distributed Control

In this work, we focus on the design of optimal controllers that must comply with an information structure. State-of-the-art approaches do so based on the H2 or Hinfty norm to minimize the expected or worst-case cost in the presence of stochastic or adversarial disturbances. Large-scale systems often experience a combination of stochastic and deterministic disruptions (e.g., sensor failures, environmental fluctuations) that spread across the system and are difficult to model precisely, leading to sub-optimal closed-loop behaviors. Hence, we propose improving performance for these scenarios by minimizing the regret with respect to an ideal policy that complies with less stringent sensor-information constraints. This endows our controller with the ability to approach the improved behavior of a more informed policy, which would detect and counteract heterogeneous and localized disturbances more promptly. Specifically, we derive convex relaxations of the resulting regret minimization problem that are compatible with any desired controller sparsity, while we reveal a renewed role of the Quadratic Invariance (QI) condition in designing informative benchmarks to measure regret. Last, we validate our proposed method through numerical simulations on controlling a multi-agent distributed system, comparing its performance with traditional H2 and Hinfty policies.

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arXiv2023

Unconstrained Parametrization of Dissipative and Contracting Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

In this work, we introduce and study a class of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in continuous-time. The proposed architecture stems from the combination of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs) with the model structure of recently introduced Recurrent Equilibrium Networks (RENs). We show how to endow our proposed NodeRENs with contractivity and dissipativity -- crucial properties for robust learning and control. Most importantly, as for RENs, we derive parametrizations of contractive and dissipative NodeRENs which are unconstrained, hence enabling their learning for a large number of parameters. We validate the properties of NodeRENs, including the possibility of handling irregularly sampled data, in a case study in nonlinear system identification.

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