arXiv subjects

Steffen W. R. Werner

Publications and source records attributed to Steffen W. R. Werner.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A tangential low-rank ADI method for solving indefinite Lyapunov equations

Continuous-time algebraic Lyapunov equations have become an essential tool in various applications. In the case of large-scale sparse coefficient matrices and indefinite constant terms, indefinite low-rank factorizations have successfully been used to allow methods like the alternating direction implicit (ADI) iteration to efficiently compute accurate approximations to the solution of the Lyapunov equation. However, classical block-type approaches quickly increase in computational costs when the rank of the constant term grows. While the regular truncation of solution approximations during the iteration may be a remedy, it does not resolve the issue of computing high-dimensional updates and may even compromise the numerical accuracy of the approximation. In this paper, we propose a novel tangential reformulation of the ADI iteration that preserves the exactness of the iterative updates while allowing for the efficient construction of low-rank approximations to the solution of Lyapunov equations with indefinite right-hand sides even in the case of constant terms with higher ranks. We provide adaptive methods for the selection of the corresponding ADI parameters, namely shifts and tangential directions, which allow for the automatic application of the method to any relevant problem setting. The effectiveness of the developed algorithms is illustrated in several numerical examples.

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arXiv2026

Symmetric Hermite quadrature-based balanced truncation for learning linear dynamical systems from derivative data

Data-driven reduced-order modeling is an essential component in the computer-aided design of control systems. In this work, we present a novel symmetric Hermite formulation of the quadrature-based balanced truncation algorithm that constructs linear reduced-order models from evaluations of the full-order system's transfer function and its derivative. Significantly, the Hermite formulation preserves desirable qualitative properties of the system used to generate the data, such as state-space Hermiticity and, consequently, asymptotic stability.

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arXiv2026

Data-driven balanced truncation for second-order systems with generalized proportional damping

Structured reduced-order modeling is a central component in the computer-aided design of control systems in which cheap-to-evaluate low-dimensional models with physically meaningful internal structures are computed. In this work, we develop a new approach for the structured data-driven surrogate modeling of linear dynamical systems described by second-order time derivatives via balanced truncation model-order reduction. The proposed method is a data-driven reformulation of position-velocity balanced truncation for second-order systems and generalizes the quadrature-based balanced truncation for unstructured first-order systems to the second-order case. The computed surrogates encode a generalized proportional damping structure, and we propose a computational procedure for inferring the damping coefficients from data by minimizing a least-squares error over the coefficients. Several numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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arXiv2026

An adaptive data sampling strategy for stabilizing dynamical systems via controller inference

Learning stabilizing controllers from data is an important task in engineering applications; however, collecting informative data is challenging because unstable systems often lead to rapidly growing or erratic trajectories. In this work, we propose an adaptive sampling scheme that generates data while simultaneously stabilizing the system to avoid instabilities during the data collection. Under mild assumptions, the approach provably generates data sets that are informative for stabilization and have minimal size. The numerical experiments demonstrate that controller inference with the novel adaptive sampling approach learns controllers with up to one order of magnitude fewer data samples than unguided data generation. The results show that the proposed approach opens the door to stabilizing systems in edge cases and limit states where instabilities often occur and data collection is inherently difficult.

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arXiv2026

A refined nonlinear least-squares method for the rational approximation problem

The adaptive Antoulas-Anderson (AAA) algorithm for rational approximation is a widely used method for the efficient construction of highly accurate rational approximations to given data. While AAA can often produce rational approximations accurate to any prescribed tolerance, these approximations may have degrees larger than what is actually required to meet the given tolerance. In this work, we consider the adaptive construction of interpolating rational approximations while aiming for the smallest feasible degree to satisfy a given error tolerance. To this end, we introduce refinement approaches to the linear least-squares step of the classical AAA algorithm that aim to minimize the true nonlinear least-squares error with respect to the given data. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the derived approaches in terms of the corresponding gradients from the resulting minimization problems and use these insights to propose a new greedy framework that ensures monotonic error convergence. Numerical examples from function approximation and model order reduction verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to construct accurate rational approximations of small degrees.

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arXiv2025

Second-order AAA algorithms for structured data-driven modeling

The data-driven modeling of dynamical systems has become an essential tool for the construction of accurate computational models from real-world data. In this process, the inherent differential structures underlying the considered physical phenomena are often neglected making the reinterpretation of the learned models in a physically meaningful sense very challenging. In this work, we present three data-driven modeling approaches for the construction of dynamical systems with second-order differential structure directly from frequency domain data. Based on the second-order structured barycentric form, we extend the well-known Adaptive Antoulas-Anderson algorithm to the case of second-order systems. Depending on the available computational resources, we propose variations of the proposed method that prioritize either higher computation speed or greater modeling accuracy, and we present a theoretical analysis for the expected accuracy and performance of the proposed methods. Three numerical examples demonstrate the effectiveness of our new structured approaches in comparison to classical unstructured data-driven modeling.

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arXiv2025

Interpolatory model reduction of dynamical systems with root mean squared error

The root mean squared error is an important measure used in a variety of applications such as structural dynamics and acoustics to model averaged deviations from standard behavior. For large-scale systems, simulations of this quantity quickly become computationally prohibitive. Classical model order reduction techniques attempt to resolve this issue via the construction of surrogate models that emulate the root mean squared error measure using an intermediate linear system. However, this approach requires a potentially large number of linear outputs, which can be disadvantageous in the design of reduced-order models. In this work, we consider directly the root mean squared error as the quantity of interest using the concept of quadratic-output models and propose several new model reduction techniques for the construction of appropriate surrogates. We test the proposed methods on a model for the vibrational response of a plate with tuned vibration absorbers.

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arXiv2025

Deep polytopic autoencoders for low-dimensional linear parameter-varying approximations and nonlinear feedback design

Polytopic autoencoders provide low-di\-men\-sion\-al parametrizations of states in a polytope. For nonlinear PDEs, this is readily applied to low-dimensional linear parameter-varying (LPV) approximations as they have been exploited for efficient nonlinear controller design via series expansions of the solution to the state-dependent Riccati equation. In this work, we develop a polytopic autoencoder for control applications and show how it improves on standard linear approaches in view of LPV approximations of nonlinear systems. We discuss how the particular architecture enables exact representation of target states and higher order series expansions of the nonlinear feedback law at little extra computational effort in the online phase and how the linear though high-dimensional and nonstandard Lyapunov equations are efficiently computed during the offline phase. In a numerical study, we illustrate the procedure and how this approach can reliably outperform the standard linear-quadratic regulator design.

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arXiv2024

Using $LDL^{T}$ factorizations in Newton's method for solving general large-scale algebraic Riccati equations

Continuous-time algebraic Riccati equations can be found in many disciplines in different forms. In the case of small-scale dense coefficient matrices, stabilizing solutions can be computed to all possible formulations of the Riccati equation. This is not the case when it comes to large-scale sparse coefficient matrices. In this paper, we provide a reformulation of the Newton-Kleinman iteration scheme for continuous-time algebraic Riccati equations using indefinite symmetric low-rank factorizations. This allows the application of the method to the case of general large-scale sparse coefficient matrices. We provide convergence results for several prominent realizations of the equation and show in numerical examples the effectiveness of the approach.

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arXiv2024

System stabilization with policy optimization on unstable latent manifolds

Stability is a basic requirement when studying the behavior of dynamical systems. However, stabilizing dynamical systems via reinforcement learning is challenging because only little data can be collected over short time horizons before instabilities are triggered and data become meaningless. This work introduces a reinforcement learning approach that is formulated over latent manifolds of unstable dynamics so that stabilizing policies can be trained from few data samples. The unstable manifolds are minimal in the sense that they contain the lowest dimensional dynamics that are necessary for learning policies that guarantee stabilization. This is in stark contrast to generic latent manifolds that aim to approximate all -- stable and unstable -- system dynamics and thus are higher dimensional and often require higher amounts of data. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach stabilizes even complex physical systems from few data samples for which other methods that operate either directly in the system state space or on generic latent manifolds fail.

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arXiv2023

Adaptive choice of near-optimal expansion points for interpolation-based structure-preserving model reduction

Interpolation-based methods are well-established and effective approaches for the efficient generation of accurate reduced-order surrogate models. Common challenges for such methods are the automatic selection of good or even optimal interpolation points and the appropriate size of the reduced-order model. An approach that addresses the first problem for linear, unstructured systems is the Iterative Rational Krylov Algorithm (IRKA), which computes optimal interpolation points through iterative updates by solving linear eigenvalue problems. However, in the case of preserving internal system structures, optimal interpolation points are unknown, and heuristics based on nonlinear eigenvalue problems result in numbers of potential interpolation points that typically exceed the reasonable size of reduced-order systems. In our work, we propose a projection-based iterative interpolation method inspired by IRKA for generally structured systems to adaptively compute near-optimal interpolation points as well as an appropriate size for the reduced-order system. Additionally, the iterative updates of the interpolation points can be chosen such that the reduced-order model provides an accurate approximation in specified frequency ranges of interest. For such applications, our new approach outperforms the established methods in terms of accuracy and computational effort. We show this in numerical examples with different structures.

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arXiv2023

Structured interpolation for multivariate transfer functions of quadratic-bilinear systems

High-dimensional/high-fidelity nonlinear dynamical systems appear naturally when the goal is to accurately model real-world phenomena. Many physical properties are thereby encoded in the internal differential structure of these resulting large-scale nonlinear systems. The high-dimensionality of the dynamics causes computational bottlenecks, especially when these large-scale systems need to be simulated for a variety of situations such as different forcing terms. This motivates model reduction where the goal is to replace the full-order dynamics with accurate reduced-order surrogates. Interpolation-based model reduction has been proven to be an effective tool for the construction of cheap-to-evaluate surrogate models that preserve the internal structure in the case of weak nonlinearities. In this paper, we consider the construction of multivariate interpolants in frequency domain for structured quadratic-bilinear systems. We propose definitions for structured variants of the symmetric subsystem and generalized transfer functions of quadratic-bilinear systems and provide conditions for structure-preserving interpolation by projection. The theoretical results are illustrated using two numerical examples including the simulation of molecular dynamics in crystal structures.

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arXiv2023

Structured barycentric forms for interpolation-based data-driven reduced modeling of second-order systems

An essential tool in data-driven modeling of dynamical systems from frequency response measurements is the barycentric form of the underlying rational transfer function. In this work, we propose structured barycentric forms for modeling dynamical systems with second-order time derivatives using their frequency domain input-output data. By imposing a set of interpolation conditions, the systems' transfer functions are rewritten in different barycentric forms using different parametrizations. Loewner-like algorithms are developed for the explicit computation of second-order systems from data based on the developed barycentric forms. Numerical experiments show the performance of these new structured data driven modeling methods compared to other interpolation-based data-driven modeling techniques from the literature.

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arXiv2023

Low-complexity linear parameter-varying approximations of incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for truncated state-dependent Riccati feedback

Nonlinear feedback design via state-dependent Riccati equations is well established but unfeasible for large-scale systems because of computational costs. If the system can be embedded in the class of linear parameter-varying (LPV) systems with the parameter dependency being affine-linear, then the nonlinear feedback law has a series expansion with constant and precomputable coefficients. In this work, we propose a general method to approximating nonlinear systems such that the series expansion is possible and efficient even for high-dimensional systems. We lay out the stabilization of incompressible Navier-Stokes equations as application, discuss the numerical solution of the involved matrix-valued equations, and confirm the performance of the approach in a numerical example.

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arXiv2023

Context-aware controller inference for stabilizing dynamical systems from scarce data

This work introduces a data-driven control approach for stabilizing high-dimensional dynamical systems from scarce data. The proposed context-aware controller inference approach is based on the observation that controllers need to act locally only on the unstable dynamics to stabilize systems. This means it is sufficient to learn the unstable dynamics alone, which are typically confined to much lower dimensional spaces than the high-dimensional state spaces of all system dynamics and thus few data samples are sufficient to identify them. Numerical experiments demonstrate that context-aware controller inference learns stabilizing controllers from orders of magnitude fewer data samples than traditional data-driven control techniques and variants of reinforcement learning. The experiments further show that the low data requirements of context-aware controller inference are especially beneficial in data-scarce engineering problems with complex physics, for which learning complete system dynamics is often intractable in terms of data and training costs.

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arXiv2022

Multi-fidelity robust controller design with gradient sampling

Robust controllers that stabilize dynamical systems even under disturbances and noise are often formulated as solutions of nonsmooth, nonconvex optimization problems. While methods such as gradient sampling can handle the nonconvexity and nonsmoothness, the costs of evaluating the objective function may be substantial, making robust control challenging for dynamical systems with high-dimensional state spaces. In this work, we introduce multi-fidelity variants of gradient sampling that leverage low-cost, low-fidelity models with low-dimensional state spaces for speeding up the optimization process while nonetheless providing convergence guarantees for a high-fidelity model of the system of interest, which is primarily accessed in the last phase of the optimization process. Our first multi-fidelity method initiates gradient sampling on higher fidelity models with starting points obtained from cheaper, lower fidelity models. Our second multi-fidelity method relies on ensembles of gradients that are computed from low- and high-fidelity models. Numerical experiments with controlling the cooling of a steel rail profile and laminar flow in a cylinder wake demonstrate that our new multi-fidelity gradient sampling methods achieve up to two orders of magnitude speedup compared to the single-fidelity gradient sampling method that relies on the high-fidelity model alone.

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arXiv2022

On the sample complexity of stabilizing linear dynamical systems from data

Learning controllers from data for stabilizing dynamical systems typically follows a two step process of first identifying a model and then constructing a controller based on the identified model. However, learning models means identifying generic descriptions of the dynamics of systems, which can require large amounts of data and extracting information that are unnecessary for the specific task of stabilization. The contribution of this work is to show that if a linear dynamical system has dimension (McMillan degree) $n$, then there always exist $n$ states from which a stabilizing feedback controller can be constructed, independent of the dimension of the representation of the observed states and the number of inputs. By building on previous work, this finding implies that any linear dynamical system can be stabilized from fewer observed states than the minimal number of states required for learning a model of the dynamics. The theoretical findings are demonstrated with numerical experiments that show the stabilization of the flow behind a cylinder from less data than necessary for learning a model.

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arXiv2022

A unifying framework for tangential interpolation of structured bilinear control systems

In this paper, we consider the structure-preserving model order reduction problem for multi-input/multi-output bilinear control systems by tangential interpolation. We propose a new type of tangential interpolation problem for structured bilinear systems, for which we develop a new structure-preserving interpolation framework. This new framework extends and generalizes different formulations of tangential interpolation for bilinear systems from the literature and also provides a unifying framework. We then derive explicit conditions on the projection spaces to enforce tangential interpolation in different settings, including conditions for tangential Hermite interpolation. The analysis is illustrated by means of three numerical examples.

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