Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Weng, Chuanghong, Nekouei, Ehsan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08860
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913020969484288
author Weng, Chuanghong
Nekouei, Ehsan
author_facet Weng, Chuanghong
Nekouei, Ehsan
contents This paper investigates the optimal privacy-aware networked control problem, in which the dynamical system affected by a private input process sends its measurement to a remote controller after stochastic quantization. An adversary seeks to infer private system inputs from quantization results and control outputs. The optimal privacy-aware quantizer and controller are obtained by solving a stochastic control problem with mutual information regularization, where the mutual information measures the privacy leakage through the quantizer and controller. We first derive the coupled Bellman equations for the optimal quantizer and controller using the dynamic programming decomposition method. We then analyze the structural properties of the solution, showing that the optimal controller is deterministic, while the optimal quantizer regulates the adversary's belief in a closed-loop manner to enhance privacy. To enable numerical optimization, the quantizer and controller are jointly parameterized and then updated via policy gradient methods, and a binary classification approach is used to approximate privacy leakage. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through numerical experiments on a building control system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_08860
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimal Privacy-Aware Co-Design of Quantizer and Controller in Networked Control Systems
Weng, Chuanghong
Nekouei, Ehsan
Systems and Control
This paper investigates the optimal privacy-aware networked control problem, in which the dynamical system affected by a private input process sends its measurement to a remote controller after stochastic quantization. An adversary seeks to infer private system inputs from quantization results and control outputs. The optimal privacy-aware quantizer and controller are obtained by solving a stochastic control problem with mutual information regularization, where the mutual information measures the privacy leakage through the quantizer and controller. We first derive the coupled Bellman equations for the optimal quantizer and controller using the dynamic programming decomposition method. We then analyze the structural properties of the solution, showing that the optimal controller is deterministic, while the optimal quantizer regulates the adversary's belief in a closed-loop manner to enhance privacy. To enable numerical optimization, the quantizer and controller are jointly parameterized and then updated via policy gradient methods, and a binary classification approach is used to approximate privacy leakage. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through numerical experiments on a building control system.
title Optimal Privacy-Aware Co-Design of Quantizer and Controller in Networked Control Systems
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08860