Neural Predictive Control to Coordinate Discrete- and Continuous-Time Models for Time-Series Analysis with Control-Theoretical Improvements

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Autori principali: Li, Haoran, Guo, Muhao, Weng, Yang, Tong, Hanghang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Haoran
Guo, Muhao
Weng, Yang
Tong, Hanghang
author_facet Li, Haoran
Guo, Muhao
Weng, Yang
Tong, Hanghang
contents Deep sequence models have achieved notable success in time-series analysis, such as interpolation and forecasting. Recent advances move beyond discrete-time architectures like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) toward continuous-time formulations such as the family of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs). Generally, they have shown that capturing the underlying dynamics is beneficial for generic tasks like interpolation, extrapolation, and classification. However, existing methods approximate the dynamics using unconstrained neural networks, which struggle to adapt reliably under distributional shifts. In this paper, we recast time-series problems as the continuous ODE-based optimal control problem. Rather than learning dynamics solely from data, we optimize control actions that steer ODE trajectories toward task objectives, bringing control-theoretical performance guarantees. To achieve this goal, we need to (1) design the appropriate control actions and (2) apply effective optimal control algorithms. As the actions should contain rich context information, we propose to employ the discrete-time model to process past sequences and generate actions, leading to a coordinate model to extract long-term temporal features to modulate short-term continuous dynamics. During training, we apply model predictive control to plan multi-step future trajectories, minimize a task-specific cost, and greedily select the optimal current action. We show that, under mild assumptions, this multi-horizon optimization leads to exponential convergence to infinite-horizon solutions, indicating that the coordinate model can gain robust and generalizable performance. Extensive experiments on diverse time-series datasets validate our method's superior generalization and adaptability compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Predictive Control to Coordinate Discrete- and Continuous-Time Models for Time-Series Analysis with Control-Theoretical Improvements
Li, Haoran
Guo, Muhao
Weng, Yang
Tong, Hanghang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Deep sequence models have achieved notable success in time-series analysis, such as interpolation and forecasting. Recent advances move beyond discrete-time architectures like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) toward continuous-time formulations such as the family of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs). Generally, they have shown that capturing the underlying dynamics is beneficial for generic tasks like interpolation, extrapolation, and classification. However, existing methods approximate the dynamics using unconstrained neural networks, which struggle to adapt reliably under distributional shifts. In this paper, we recast time-series problems as the continuous ODE-based optimal control problem. Rather than learning dynamics solely from data, we optimize control actions that steer ODE trajectories toward task objectives, bringing control-theoretical performance guarantees. To achieve this goal, we need to (1) design the appropriate control actions and (2) apply effective optimal control algorithms. As the actions should contain rich context information, we propose to employ the discrete-time model to process past sequences and generate actions, leading to a coordinate model to extract long-term temporal features to modulate short-term continuous dynamics. During training, we apply model predictive control to plan multi-step future trajectories, minimize a task-specific cost, and greedily select the optimal current action. We show that, under mild assumptions, this multi-horizon optimization leads to exponential convergence to infinite-horizon solutions, indicating that the coordinate model can gain robust and generalizable performance. Extensive experiments on diverse time-series datasets validate our method's superior generalization and adaptability compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
title Neural Predictive Control to Coordinate Discrete- and Continuous-Time Models for Time-Series Analysis with Control-Theoretical Improvements
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01833