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Main Authors: Cheng, Xiaoyuan, Yuan, Wenxuan, Yang, Yiming, Zhang, Yuanzhao, Cheng, Sibo, He, Yi, Sun, Zhuo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13025
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author Cheng, Xiaoyuan
Yuan, Wenxuan
Yang, Yiming
Zhang, Yuanzhao
Cheng, Sibo
He, Yi
Sun, Zhuo
author_facet Cheng, Xiaoyuan
Yuan, Wenxuan
Yang, Yiming
Zhang, Yuanzhao
Cheng, Sibo
He, Yi
Sun, Zhuo
contents The Koopman operator provides a powerful framework for modeling dynamical systems and has attracted growing interest from the machine learning community. However, its infinite-dimensional nature makes identifying suitable finite-dimensional subspaces challenging, especially for deep architectures. We argue that these difficulties come from suboptimal representation learning, where latent variables fail to balance expressivity and simplicity. This tension is closely related to the information bottleneck (IB) dilemma: constructing compressed representations that are both compact and predictive. Rethinking Koopman learning through this lens, we demonstrate that latent mutual information promotes simplicity, yet an overemphasis on simplicity may cause latent space to collapse onto a few dominant modes. In contrast, expressiveness is sustained by the von Neumann entropy, which prevents such collapse and encourages mode diversity. This insight leads us to propose an information-theoretic Lagrangian formulation that explicitly balances this tradeoff. Furthermore, we propose a new algorithm based on the Lagrangian formulation that encourages both simplicity and expressiveness, leading to a stable and interpretable Koopman representation. Beyond quantitative evaluations, we further visualize the learned manifolds under our representations, observing empirical results consistent with our theoretical predictions. Finally, we validate our approach across a diverse range of dynamical systems, demonstrating improved performance over existing Koopman learning methods. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/Wenxuan52/InformationKoopman.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13025
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Information Shapes Koopman Representation
Cheng, Xiaoyuan
Yuan, Wenxuan
Yang, Yiming
Zhang, Yuanzhao
Cheng, Sibo
He, Yi
Sun, Zhuo
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
The Koopman operator provides a powerful framework for modeling dynamical systems and has attracted growing interest from the machine learning community. However, its infinite-dimensional nature makes identifying suitable finite-dimensional subspaces challenging, especially for deep architectures. We argue that these difficulties come from suboptimal representation learning, where latent variables fail to balance expressivity and simplicity. This tension is closely related to the information bottleneck (IB) dilemma: constructing compressed representations that are both compact and predictive. Rethinking Koopman learning through this lens, we demonstrate that latent mutual information promotes simplicity, yet an overemphasis on simplicity may cause latent space to collapse onto a few dominant modes. In contrast, expressiveness is sustained by the von Neumann entropy, which prevents such collapse and encourages mode diversity. This insight leads us to propose an information-theoretic Lagrangian formulation that explicitly balances this tradeoff. Furthermore, we propose a new algorithm based on the Lagrangian formulation that encourages both simplicity and expressiveness, leading to a stable and interpretable Koopman representation. Beyond quantitative evaluations, we further visualize the learned manifolds under our representations, observing empirical results consistent with our theoretical predictions. Finally, we validate our approach across a diverse range of dynamical systems, demonstrating improved performance over existing Koopman learning methods. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/Wenxuan52/InformationKoopman.
title Information Shapes Koopman Representation
topic Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13025