Controlled-Minimax: Stabilizing Adversarial Optimization via Control Theory

Abstract: Minimax optimization is fundamental to adversarial learning yet suffers from severe stability challenges, often manifesting as persistent limit cycles or divergence. This paper investigates these instabilities through the lens of continuous-time dynamical systems. By modeling training dynamics as a second-order Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE), we rigorously identify the root cause of non-convergence: the problematic eigenstructure of the loss function's Hessian near equilibrium points. To address this, we introduce Controlled-Minimax, a novel stabilization framework that reformulates the optimization trajectory as a controllable physical system. Unlike heuristic regularization techniques, our approach derives a specific feedback controller that provides theoretical guarantees of local exponential stability, regardless of the underlying Hessian spectrum. Consequently, our method stabilizes general minimax problems where traditional gradient descent-ascent methods fail. Extensive experiments on pathological benchmarks including the Dirac-GAN, 2D Gaussian mixtures, and Swiss Roll datasets, as well as high-resolution image synthesis with StyleGAN2-ada, demonstrate that Controlled-Minimax effectively suppresses oscillatory behavior while ensuring fast and robust convergence.