We develop a data-driven framework for learning and correcting non-autonomous vehicle dynamics. Physics-based vehicle models are often simplified for tractability and therefore exhibit inherent model-form uncertainty, motivating the need for data-driven correction. Moreover, non-autonomous dynamics are governed by time-dependent control inputs, which pose challenges in learning predictive models directly from temporal snapshot data. To address these, we reformulate the vehicle dynamics via a local parameterization of the time-dependent inputs, yielding a modified system composed of a sequence of local parametric dynamical systems. We approximate these parametric systems using two complementary approaches. First, we employ the DRIPS (dimension reduction and interpolation in parameter space) methodology to construct efficient linear surrogate models, equipped with lifted observable spaces and manifold-based operator interpolation. This enables data-efficient learning of vehicle models whose dynamics admit accurate linear representations in the lifted spaces. Second, for more strongly nonlinear systems, we employ FML (Flow Map Learning), a deep neural network approach that approximates the parametric evolution map without requiring special treatment of nonlinearities. We further extend FML with a transfer-learning-based model correction procedure, enabling the correction of misspecified prior models using only a sparse set of high-fidelity or experimental measurements, without assuming a prescribed form for the correction term. Through a suite of numerical experiments on unicycle, simplified bicycle, and slip-based bicycle models, we demonstrate that DRIPS offers robust and highly data-efficient learning of non-autonomous vehicle dynamics, while FML provides expressive nonlinear modeling and effective correction of model-form errors under severe data scarcity.

We present a data-driven learning approach for unknown nonautonomous dynamical systems with time-dependent inputs based on dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). To circumvent the difficulty of approximating the time-dependent Koopman operators for nonautonomous systems, a modified system derived from local parameterization of the external time-dependent inputs is employed as an approximation to the original nonautonomous system. The modified system comprises a sequence of local parametric systems, which can be well approximated by a parametric surrogate model using our previously proposed framework for dimension reduction and interpolation in parameter space (DRIPS). The offline step of DRIPS relies on DMD to build a linear surrogate model, endowed with reduced-order bases (ROBs), for the observables mapped from training data. Then the offline step constructs a sequence of iterative parametric surrogate models from interpolations on suitable manifolds, where the target/test parameter points are specified by the local parameterization of the test external time-dependent inputs. We present a number of numerical examples to demonstrate the robustness of our method and compare its performance with deep neural networks in the same settings.

Natural-gradient descent on structured parameter spaces (e.g., low-rank covariances) is computationally challenging due to complicated inverse Fisher-matrix computations. We address this issue for optimization, inference, and search problems by using \emph{local-parameter coordinates}. Our method generalizes an existing evolutionary-strategy method, recovers Newton and Riemannian-gradient methods as special cases, and also yields new tractable natural-gradient algorithms for learning flexible covariance structures of Gaussian and Wishart-based distributions. We show results on a range of applications on deep learning, variational inference, and evolution strategies. Our work opens a new direction for scalable structured geometric methods via local parameterizations.