Learning non-Markovian Dynamical Systems with Signature-based Encoders

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pradeleix, Eliott, Hosseinkhan-Boucher, Rémy, Shilova, Alena, Semeraro, Onofrio, Mathelin, Lionel
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915495478820864
author Pradeleix, Eliott
Hosseinkhan-Boucher, Rémy
Shilova, Alena
Semeraro, Onofrio
Mathelin, Lionel
author_facet Pradeleix, Eliott
Hosseinkhan-Boucher, Rémy
Shilova, Alena
Semeraro, Onofrio
Mathelin, Lionel
contents Neural ordinary differential equations offer an effective framework for modeling dynamical systems by learning a continuous-time vector field. However, they rely on the Markovian assumption - that future states depend only on the current state - which is often untrue in real-world scenarios where the dynamics may depend on the history of past states. This limitation becomes especially evident in settings involving the continuous control of complex systems with delays and memory effects. To capture historical dependencies, existing approaches often rely on recurrent neural network (RNN)-based encoders, which are inherently discrete and struggle with continuous modeling. In addition, they may exhibit poor training behavior. In this work, we investigate the use of the signature transform as an encoder for learning non-Markovian dynamics in a continuous-time setting. The signature transform offers a continuous-time alternative with strong theoretical foundations and proven efficiency in summarizing multidimensional information in time. We integrate a signature-based encoding scheme into encoder-decoder dynamics models and demonstrate that it outperforms RNN-based alternatives in test performance on synthetic benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12022
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning non-Markovian Dynamical Systems with Signature-based Encoders
Pradeleix, Eliott
Hosseinkhan-Boucher, Rémy
Shilova, Alena
Semeraro, Onofrio
Mathelin, Lionel
Machine Learning
Neural ordinary differential equations offer an effective framework for modeling dynamical systems by learning a continuous-time vector field. However, they rely on the Markovian assumption - that future states depend only on the current state - which is often untrue in real-world scenarios where the dynamics may depend on the history of past states. This limitation becomes especially evident in settings involving the continuous control of complex systems with delays and memory effects. To capture historical dependencies, existing approaches often rely on recurrent neural network (RNN)-based encoders, which are inherently discrete and struggle with continuous modeling. In addition, they may exhibit poor training behavior. In this work, we investigate the use of the signature transform as an encoder for learning non-Markovian dynamics in a continuous-time setting. The signature transform offers a continuous-time alternative with strong theoretical foundations and proven efficiency in summarizing multidimensional information in time. We integrate a signature-based encoding scheme into encoder-decoder dynamics models and demonstrate that it outperforms RNN-based alternatives in test performance on synthetic benchmarks.
title Learning non-Markovian Dynamical Systems with Signature-based Encoders
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12022