Temporally-Consistent Bilinearly Recurrent Autoencoders for Control Systems

Abstract: This paper introduces the temporally-consistent bilinearly recurrent autoencoder (tcBLRAN), a Koopman operator based neural network architecture for modeling a control-affine nonlinear control system. The proposed method extends traditional Koopman autoencoders (KAE) by incorporating bilinear recurrent dynamics that are consistent across predictions, enabling accurate long-term forecasting for control-affine systems. This overcomes the roadblock that KAEs face when encountered with limited and noisy training datasets, resulting in a lack of generalizability due to inconsistency in training data. Through a blend of deep learning and dynamical systems theory, tcBLRAN demonstrates superior performance in capturing complex behaviors and control systems dynamics, providing a superior data-driven modeling technique for control systems and outperforming the state-of-the-art Koopman bilinear form (KBF) learned by autoencoder networks.