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 stochastic dynamical system


Nonlocal Kramers-Moyal formulas and data-driven discovery of stochastic dynamical systems with multiplicative Lévy noise

Li, Yang, Duan, Jinqiao

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Traditional data-driven methods, effective for deterministic systems or stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with Gaussian noise, fail to handle the discontinuous sample paths and heavy-tailed fluctuations characteristic of Lévy processes, particularly when the noise is state-dependent. To bridge this gap, we establish nonlocal Kramers-Moyal formulas, rigorously generalizing the classical Kramers-Moyal relations to SDEs with multiplicative Lévy noise. These formulas provide a direct link between short-time transition probability densities (or sample path statistics) and the underlying SDE coefficients: the drift vector, diffusion matrix, Lévy jump measure kernel, and Lévy noise intensity functions. Leveraging these theoretical foundations, we develop novel data-driven algorithms capable of simultaneously identifying all governing components from data and establish convergence results and error analysis for the algorithms. We validate the framework through extensive numerical experiments on prototypical systems. This work provides a principled and practical toolbox for discovering interpretable SDE models governing complex systems influenced by discontinuous, heavy-tailed, state-dependent fluctuations, with broad applicability in climate science, neuroscience, epidemiology, finance, and biological physics.


Detecting Stochasticity in Discrete Signals via Nonparametric Excursion Theorem

Tanweer, Sunia, Khasawneh, Firas A.

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We develop a practical framework for distinguishing diffusive stochastic processes from deterministic signals using only a single discrete time series. Our approach is based on classical excursion and crossing theorems for continuous semimartingales, which correlates number $N_\varepsilon$ of excursions of magnitude at least $\varepsilon$ with the quadratic variation $[X]_T$ of the process. The scaling law holds universally for all continuous semimartingales with finite quadratic variation, including general Ito diffusions with nonlinear or state-dependent volatility, but fails sharply for deterministic systems -- thereby providing a theoretically-certfied method of distinguishing between these dynamics, as opposed to the subjective entropy or recurrence based state of the art methods. We construct a robust data-driven diffusion test. The method compares the empirical excursion counts against the theoretical expectation. The resulting ratio $K(\varepsilon)=N_{\varepsilon}^{\mathrm{emp}}/N_{\varepsilon}^{\mathrm{theory}}$ is then summarized by a log-log slope deviation measuring the $\varepsilon^{-2}$ law that provides a classification into diffusion-like or not. We demonstrate the method on canonical stochastic systems, some periodic and chaotic maps and systems with additive white noise, as well as the stochastic Duffing system. The approach is nonparametric, model-free, and relies only on the universal small-scale structure of continuous semimartingales.


AI Agents as Universal Task Solvers

Achille, Alessandro, Soatto, Stefano

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI reasoning agents are already able to solve a variety of tasks by deploying tools, simulating outcomes of multiple hypotheses and reflecting on them. In doing so, they perform computation, although not in the classical sense -- there is no program being executed. Still, if they perform computation, can AI agents be universal? Can chain-of-thought reasoning solve any computable task? How does an AI Agent learn to reason? Is it a matter of model size? Or training dataset size? In this work, we reinterpret the role of learning in the context of AI Agents, viewing them as compute-capable stochastic dynamical systems, and highlight the role of time in a foundational principle for learning to reason. In doing so, we propose a shift from classical inductive learning to transductive learning -- where the objective is not to approximate the distribution of past data, but to capture their algorithmic structure to reduce the time needed to find solutions to new tasks. Transductive learning suggests that, counter to Shannon's theory, a key role of information in learning is about reduction of time rather than reconstruction error. In particular, we show that the optimal speed-up that a universal solver can achieve using past data is tightly related to their algorithmic information. Using this, we show a theoretical derivation for the observed power-law scaling of inference time versus training time. We then show that scaling model size can lead to behaviors that, while improving accuracy on benchmarks, fail any reasonable test of intelligence, let alone super-intelligence: In the limit of infinite space and time, large models can behave as savants, able to brute-force through any task without any insight. Instead, we argue that the key quantity to optimize when scaling reasoning models is time, whose critical role in learning has so far only been indirectly considered.


VeRecycle: Reclaiming Guarantees from Probabilistic Certificates for Stochastic Dynamical Systems after Change

Lutz, Sterre, Spaan, Matthijs T. J., Lukina, Anna

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Autonomous systems operating in the real world encounter a range of uncertainties. Probabilistic neural Lyapunov certification is a powerful approach to proving safety of nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems. When faced with changes beyond the modeled uncertainties, e.g., unidentified obstacles, probabilistic certificates must be transferred to the new system dynamics. However, even when the changes are localized in a known part of the state space, state-of-the-art requires complete re-certification, which is particularly costly for neural certificates. We introduce VeRecycle, the first framework to formally reclaim guarantees for discrete-time stochastic dynamical systems. VeRecycle efficiently reuses probabilistic certificates when the system dynamics deviate only in a given subset of states. We present a general theoretical justification and algorithmic implementation. Our experimental evaluation shows scenarios where VeRecycle both saves significant computational effort and achieves competitive probabilistic guarantees in compositional neural control.


Flow-based Bayesian filtering for high-dimensional nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems

Wang, Xintong, Guan, Xiaofei, Guo, Ling, Wu, Hao

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Bayesian filtering for high-dimensional nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems is a fundamental yet challenging problem in many fields of science and engineering. Existing methods face significant obstacles: Gaussian-based filters struggle with non-Gaussian distributions, while sequential Monte Carlo methods are computationally intensive and prone to particle degeneracy in high dimensions. Although generative models in machine learning have made significant progress in modeling high-dimensional non-Gaussian distributions, their inefficiency in online updating limits their applicability to filtering problems. To address these challenges, we propose a flow-based Bayesian filter (FBF) that integrates normalizing flows to construct a novel latent linear state-space model with Gaussian filtering distributions. This framework facilitates efficient density estimation and sampling using invertible transformations provided by normalizing flows, and it enables the construction of filters in a data-driven manner, without requiring prior knowledge of system dynamics or observation models. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superior accuracy and efficiency of FBF.


Export Reviews, Discussions, Author Feedback and Meta-Reviews

Neural Information Processing Systems

The authors propose a general framework for designing new MCMC samplers, including methods that use stochastic gradients. Their approach is to define a stochastic dynamical system whose stationary distribution is the target distribution from which we want to sample from. The stochastic dynamical system is represented through a stochastic differential equation that is simulated through an epsilon-discretization approach. As the step-size parameter epsilon goes to zero, the bias in the simulation vanishes. The proposed approach can handle stochastic approximations obtained by sub-sampling the data in mini-batches.


An evolutionary approach for discovering non-Gaussian stochastic dynamical systems based on nonlocal Kramers-Moyal formulas

Li, Yang, Xu, Shengyuan, Duan, Jinqiao

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Discovering explicit governing equations of stochastic dynamical systems with both (Gaussian) Brownian noise and (non-Gaussian) L\'evy noise from data is chanllenging due to possible intricate functional forms and the inherent complexity of L\'evy motion. This present research endeavors to develop an evolutionary symbol sparse regression (ESSR) approach to extract non-Gaussian stochastic dynamical systems from sample path data, based on nonlocal Kramers-Moyal formulas, genetic programming, and sparse regression. More specifically, the genetic programming is employed to generate a diverse array of candidate functions, the sparse regression technique aims at learning the coefficients associated with these candidates, and the nonlocal Kramers-Moyal formulas serve as the foundation for constructing the fitness measure in genetic programming and the loss function in sparse regression. The efficacy and capabilities of this approach are showcased through its application to several illustrative models. This approach stands out as a potent instrument for deciphering non-Gaussian stochastic dynamics from available datasets, indicating a wide range of applications across different fields.


Data-driven Effective Modeling of Multiscale Stochastic Dynamical Systems

Chen, Yuan, Xiu, Dongbin

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We present a numerical method for learning the dynamics of slow components of unknown multiscale stochastic dynamical systems. While the governing equations of the systems are unknown, bursts of observation data of the slow variables are available. By utilizing the observation data, our proposed method is capable of constructing a generative stochastic model that can accurately capture the effective dynamics of the slow variables in distribution. We present a comprehensive set of numerical examples to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.


Statistical Reachability Analysis of Stochastic Cyber-Physical Systems under Distribution Shift

Hashemi, Navid, Lindemann, Lars, Deshmukh, Jyotirmoy V.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reachability analysis is a popular method to give safety guarantees for stochastic cyber-physical systems (SCPSs) that takes in a symbolic description of the system dynamics and uses set-propagation methods to compute an overapproximation of the set of reachable states over a bounded time horizon. In this paper, we investigate the problem of performing reachability analysis for an SCPS that does not have a symbolic description of the dynamics, but instead is described using a digital twin model that can be simulated to generate system trajectories. An important challenge is that the simulator implicitly models a probability distribution over the set of trajectories of the SCPS; however, it is typical to have a sim2real gap, i.e., the actual distribution of the trajectories in a deployment setting may be shifted from the distribution assumed by the simulator. We thus propose a statistical reachability analysis technique that, given a user-provided threshold $1-\epsilon$, provides a set that guarantees that any reachable state during deployment lies in this set with probability not smaller than this threshold. Our method is based on three main steps: (1) learning a deterministic surrogate model from sampled trajectories, (2) conducting reachability analysis over the surrogate model, and (3) employing {\em robust conformal inference} using an additional set of sampled trajectories to quantify the surrogate model's distribution shift with respect to the deployed SCPS. To counter conservatism in reachable sets, we propose a novel method to train surrogate models that minimizes a quantile loss term (instead of the usual mean squared loss), and a new method that provides tighter guarantees using conformal inference using a normalized surrogate error. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique on various case studies.


Modeling Unknown Stochastic Dynamical System Subject to External Excitation

Chen, Yuan, Xiu, Dongbin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present a numerical method for learning unknown nonautonomous stochastic dynamical system, i.e., stochastic system subject to time dependent excitation or control signals. Our basic assumption is that the governing equations for the stochastic system are unavailable. However, short bursts of input/output (I/O) data consisting of certain known excitation signals and their corresponding system responses are available. When a sufficient amount of such I/O data are available, our method is capable of learning the unknown dynamics and producing an accurate predictive model for the stochastic responses of the system subject to arbitrary excitation signals not in the training data. Our method has two key components: (1) a local approximation of the training I/O data to transfer the learning into a parameterized form; and (2) a generative model to approximate the underlying unknown stochastic flow map in distribution. After presenting the method in detail, we present a comprehensive set of numerical examples to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, especially for long-term system predictions.