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Levon Nurbekyan

Publications and source records attributed to Levon Nurbekyan.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Mean-field control barrier functions for stochastic multi-agent systems

Many applications involving multi-agent systems require fulfilling safety constraints. Control barrier functions offer a systematic framework to enforce forward invariance of safety sets. Recent work extended this paradigm to mean-field scenarios, where the number of agents is large enough to make density-space descriptions a reasonable workaround for the curse of dimensionality. However, an open gap in the recent literature concerns the development of mean-field control barrier functions for Fokker-Planck (advection-diffusion) equations. In this work, we address this gap, enabling safe mean-field control of agents with stochastic microscopic dynamics. We provide bounded stability guarantees under safety corrections and corroborate our results through numerical simulations in two representative scenarios, coverage and shepherding control of multi-agent systems.

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arXiv2026

Differentiating through Stochastic Differential Equations: A Primer

Dynamical systems are essential to model various phenomena in physics, finance, economics, and are also of current interest in machine learning. A central modeling task is investigating parameter sensitivity, whether tuning atmospheric coefficients, computing financial Greeks, or optimizing neural networks. These sensitivities are mathematically expressed as derivatives of an objective function with respect to parameters of interest and are rarely available analytically, necessitating numerical methods for approximating them. While the literature for differentiation of deterministic systems is well-covered, the treatment of stochastic systems, such as stochastic differential equations (SDEs), in most curricula is less comprehensive than the subtleties arising from the interplay of noise and discretization require. This paper provides a primer on numerical differentiation of SDEs organized as a two-tale narrative. Tale 1 demonstrates differentiating through discretized SDEs, known the discretize-optimize approach, is reliable for both Itô and Stratonovich calculus. Tale 2 examines the optimize-discretize approach, investigating the continuous limit of backward equations from Tale 1 corresponding to the desired gradients. Our aim is to equip readers with a clear guide on the numerical differentiation of SDEs: computing gradients correctly in both Itô and Stratonovich settings, understanding when discretize-optimize and optimize-discretize agree or diverge, and developing intuition for reasoning about stochastic differentiation beyond the cases explicitly covered.

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arXiv2025

A primal-dual price-optimization method for computing equilibrium prices in mean-field games models

We develop a simple yet efficient Lagrangian method for computing equilibrium prices in a mean-field game price-formation model. We prove that equilibrium prices are optimal in terms of a suitable criterion and derive a primal-dual gradient-based algorithm for computing them. One of the highlights of our computational framework is the efficient, simple, and flexible implementation of the algorithm using modern automatic differentiation techniques. Our implementation is modular and admits a seamless extension to high-dimensional settings with more complex dynamics, costs, and equilibrium conditions. Additionally, automatic differentiation enables a versatile algorithm that requires only coding the cost functions of agents. It automatically handles the gradients of the costs, thereby eliminating the need to manually form the adjoint equations.

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arXiv2024

Mean-Field Control Barrier Functions: A Framework for Real-Time Swarm Control

Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) are an effective methodology to ensure safety and performative efficacy in real-time control applications such as power systems, resource allocation, autonomous vehicles, robotics, etc. This approach ensures safety independently of the high-level tasks that may have been pre-planned offline. For example, CBFs can be used to guarantee that a vehicle will remain in its lane. However, when the number of agents is large, computation of CBFs can suffer from the curse of dimensionality in the multi-agent setting. In this work, we present Mean-field Control Barrier Functions (MF-CBFs), which extends the CBF framework to the mean-field (or swarm control) setting. The core idea is to model a population of agents as probability measures in the state space and build corresponding control barrier functions. Similar to traditional CBFs, we derive safety constraints on the (distributed) controls but now relying on the differential calculus in the space of probability measures.

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arXiv2024

Adaptive Preconditioned Gradient Descent with Energy

We propose an adaptive step size with an energy approach for a suitable class of preconditioned gradient descent methods. We focus on settings where the preconditioning is applied to address the constraints in optimization problems, such as the Hessian-Riemannian and natural gradient descent methods. More specifically, we incorporate these preconditioned gradient descent algorithms in the recently introduced Adaptive Energy Gradient Descent (AEGD) framework. In particular, we discuss theoretical results on the unconditional energy-stability and convergence rates across three classes of objective functions. Furthermore, our numerical results demonstrate excellent performance of the proposed method on several test bed optimization problems.

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arXiv2024

Kernel Expansions for High-Dimensional Mean-Field Control with Non-local Interactions

Mean-field control (MFC) problems aim to find the optimal policy to control massive populations of interacting agents. These problems are crucial in areas such as economics, physics, and biology. We consider the non-local setting, where the interactions between agents are governed by a suitable kernel. For $N$ agents, the interaction cost has $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ complexity, which can be prohibitively slow to evaluate and differentiate when $N$ is large. To this end, we propose an efficient primal-dual algorithm that utilizes basis expansions of the kernels. The basis expansions reduce the cost of computing the interactions, while the primal-dual methodology decouples the agents at the expense of solving for a moderate number of dual variables. We also demonstrate that our approach can further be structured in a multi-resolution manner, where we estimate optimal dual variables using a moderate $N$ and solve decoupled trajectory optimization problems for large $N$. We illustrate the effectiveness of our method on an optimal control of 5000 interacting quadrotors.

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arXiv2024

Monotone inclusion methods for a class of second-order non-potential mean-field games

We propose a monotone splitting algorithm for solving a class of second-order non-potential mean-field games. Following [Achdou, Capuzzo-Dolcetta, "Mean Field Games: Numerical Methods," SINUM (2010)], we introduce a finite-difference scheme and observe that the scheme represents first-order optimality conditions for a primal-dual pair of monotone inclusions. Based on this observation, we prove that the finite-difference system obtains a solution that can be provably recovered by an extension of the celebrated primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) algorithm.

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arXiv2024

Applications of No-Collision Transportation Maps in Manifold Learning

In this work, we investigate applications of no-collision transportation maps introduced in [Nurbekyan et. al., 2020] in manifold learning for image data. Recently, there has been a surge in applying transportation-based distances and features for data representing motion-like or deformation-like phenomena. Indeed, comparing intensities at fixed locations often does not reveal the data structure. No-collision maps and distances developed in [Nurbekyan et. al., 2020] are sensitive to geometric features similar to optimal transportation (OT) maps but much cheaper to compute due to the absence of optimization. In this work, we prove that no-collision distances provide an isometry between translations (respectively dilations) of a single probability measure and the translation (respectively dilation) vectors equipped with a Euclidean distance. Furthermore, we prove that no-collision transportation maps, as well as OT and linearized OT maps, do not in general provide an isometry for rotations. The numerical experiments confirm our theoretical findings and show that no-collision distances achieve similar or better performance on several manifold learning tasks compared to other OT and Euclidean-based methods at a fraction of a computational cost.

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arXiv2023

Alternating the Population and Control Neural Networks to Solve High-Dimensional Stochastic Mean-Field Games

We present APAC-Net, an alternating population and agent control neural network for solving stochastic mean field games (MFGs). Our algorithm is geared toward high-dimensional instances of MFGs that are beyond reach with existing solution methods. We achieve this in two steps. First, we take advantage of the underlying variational primal-dual structure that MFGs exhibit and phrase it as a convex-concave saddle point problem. Second, we parameterize the value and density functions by two neural networks, respectively. By phrasing the problem in this manner, solving the MFG can be interpreted as a special case of training a generative adversarial network (GAN). We show the potential of our method on up to 100-dimensional MFG problems.

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arXiv2023

Efficient Natural Gradient Descent Methods for Large-Scale PDE-Based Optimization Problems

We propose efficient numerical schemes for implementing the natural gradient descent (NGD) for a broad range of metric spaces with applications to PDE-based optimization problems. Our technique represents the natural gradient direction as a solution to a standard least-squares problem. Hence, instead of calculating, storing, or inverting the information matrix directly, we apply efficient methods from numerical linear algebra. We treat both scenarios where the Jacobian, i.e., the derivative of the state variable with respect to the parameter, is either explicitly known or implicitly given through constraints. We can thus reliably compute several natural NGDs for a large-scale parameter space. In particular, we are able to compute Wasserstein NGD in thousands of dimensions, which was believed to be out of reach. Finally, our numerical results shed light on the qualitative differences between the standard gradient descent and various NGD methods based on different metric spaces in nonconvex optimization problems.

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arXiv2022

Taming Hyperparameter Tuning in Continuous Normalizing Flows Using the JKO Scheme

A normalizing flow (NF) is a mapping that transforms a chosen probability distribution to a normal distribution. Such flows are a common technique used for data generation and density estimation in machine learning and data science. The density estimate obtained with a NF requires a change of variables formula that involves the computation of the Jacobian determinant of the NF transformation. In order to tractably compute this determinant, continuous normalizing flows (CNF) estimate the mapping and its Jacobian determinant using a neural ODE. Optimal transport (OT) theory has been successfully used to assist in finding CNFs by formulating them as OT problems with a soft penalty for enforcing the standard normal distribution as a target measure. A drawback of OT-based CNFs is the addition of a hyperparameter, $α$, that controls the strength of the soft penalty and requires significant tuning. We present JKO-Flow, an algorithm to solve OT-based CNF without the need of tuning $α$. This is achieved by integrating the OT CNF framework into a Wasserstein gradient flow framework, also known as the JKO scheme. Instead of tuning $α$, we repeatedly solve the optimization problem for a fixed $α$ effectively performing a JKO update with a time-step $α$. Hence we obtain a "divide and conquer" algorithm by repeatedly solving simpler problems instead of solving a potentially harder problem with large $α$.

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arXiv2022

Random Features for High-Dimensional Nonlocal Mean-Field Games

We propose an efficient solution approach for high-dimensional nonlocal mean-field game (MFG) systems based on the Monte Carlo approximation of interaction kernels via random features. We avoid costly space-discretizations of interaction terms in the state-space by passing to the feature-space. This approach allows for a seamless mean-field extension of virtually any single-agent trajectory optimization algorithm. Here, we extend the direct transcription approach in optimal control to the mean-field setting. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method by solving MFG problems in high-dimensional spaces which were previously out of reach for conventional non-deep-learning techniques.

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arXiv2022

A Neural Network Approach for High-Dimensional Optimal Control Applied to Multi-Agent Path Finding

We propose a neural network approach that yields approximate solutions for high-dimensional optimal control problems and demonstrate its effectiveness using examples from multi-agent path finding. Our approach yields controls in a feedback form, where the policy function is given by a neural network (NN). Specifically, we fuse the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) and Pontryagin Maximum Principle (PMP) approaches by parameterizing the value function with an NN. Our approach enables us to obtain approximately optimal controls in real-time without having to solve an optimization problem. Once the policy function is trained, generating a control at a given space-time location takes milliseconds; in contrast, efficient nonlinear programming methods typically perform the same task in seconds. We train the NN offline using the objective function of the control problem and penalty terms that enforce the HJB equations. Therefore, our training algorithm does not involve data generated by another algorithm. By training on a distribution of initial states, we ensure the controls' optimality on a large portion of the state-space. Our grid-free approach scales efficiently to dimensions where grids become impractical or infeasible. We apply our approach to several multi-agent collision-avoidance problems in up to 150 dimensions. Furthermore, we empirically observe that the number of parameters in our approach scales linearly with the dimension of the control problem, thereby mitigating the curse of dimensionality.

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arXiv2022

Optimal Transport for Parameter Identification of Chaotic Dynamics via Invariant Measures

We study an optimal transportation approach for recovering parameters in dynamical systems with a single smoothly varying attractor. We assume that the data is not sufficient for estimating time derivatives of state variables but enough to approximate the long-time behavior of the system through an approximation of its physical measure. Thus, we fit physical measures by taking the Wasserstein distance from optimal transportation as a misfit function between two probability distributions. In particular, we analyze the regularity of the resulting loss function for general transportation costs and derive gradient formulas. Physical measures are approximated as fixed points of suitable PDE-based Perron--Frobenius operators. Test cases discussed in the paper include common low-dimensional dynamical systems.

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arXiv2022

A numerical algorithm for inverse problem from partial boundary measurement arising from mean field game problem

In this work, we consider a novel inverse problem in mean-field games (MFG). We aim to recover the MFG model parameters that govern the underlying interactions among the population based on a limited set of noisy partial observations of the population dynamics under the limited aperture. Due to its severe ill-posedness, obtaining a good quality reconstruction is very difficult. Nonetheless, it is vital to recover the model parameters stably and efficiently in order to uncover the underlying causes for population dynamics for practical needs. Our work focuses on the simultaneous recovery of running cost and interaction energy in the MFG equations from a \emph{finite number of boundary measurements} of population profile and boundary movement. To achieve this goal, we formalize the inverse problem as a constrained optimization problem of a least squares residual functional under suitable norms. We then develop a fast and robust operator splitting algorithm to solve the optimization using techniques including harmonic extensions, three-operator splitting scheme, and primal-dual hybrid gradient method. Numerical experiments illustrate the effectiveness and robustness of the algorithm.

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arXiv2021

A Neural Network Approach Applied to Multi-Agent Optimal Control

We propose a neural network approach for solving high-dimensional optimal control problems. In particular, we focus on multi-agent control problems with obstacle and collision avoidance. These problems immediately become high-dimensional, even for moderate phase-space dimensions per agent. Our approach fuses the Pontryagin Maximum Principle and Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) approaches and parameterizes the value function with a neural network. Our approach yields controls in a feedback form for quick calculation and robustness to moderate disturbances to the system. We train our model using the objective function and optimality conditions of the control problem. Therefore, our training algorithm neither involves a data generation phase nor solutions from another algorithm. Our model uses empirically effective HJB penalizers for efficient training. By training on a distribution of initial states, we ensure the controls' optimality is achieved on a large portion of the state-space. Our approach is grid-free and scales efficiently to dimensions where grids become impractical or infeasible. We demonstrate our approach's effectiveness on a 150-dimensional multi-agent problem with obstacles.

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arXiv2020

Splitting methods for a class of non-potential mean field games

We extend the methods from Nurbekyan, Saude "Fourier approximation methods for first-order nonlocal mean-field games" [Port. Math. 75 (2018), no. 3-4] and Liu, Jacobs, Li, Nurbekyan, Osher "Computational methods for nonlocal mean field games with applications" [arXiv:2004.12210] to a class of non-potential mean-field game (MFG) systems with mixed couplings. Up to now, splitting methods have been applied to potential MFG systems that can be cast as convex-concave saddle-point problems. Here, we show that a class of non-potential MFG can be cast as primal-dual pairs of monotone inclusions and solved via extensions of convex optimization algorithms such as the primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) algorithm. A critical feature of our approach is in considering dual variables of nonlocal couplings in Fourier or feature spaces.

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