Control Systems and Identification Open access Peer reviewed

An Adaptive Data Sampling Strategy for Stabilizing Dynamical Systems via Controller Inference

Steffen W. R. Werner, Benjamin Peherstorfer

SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing | Jul 14, 2026

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract. Learning stabilizing controllers from data is an important task in engineering applications; however, collecting informative data is challenging because unstable systems often lead to rapidly growing or erratic trajectories. In this work, we propose an adaptive sampling scheme that generates data while simultaneously stabilizing the system to avoid instabilities during the data collection. Under mild assumptions, the approach provably generates data sets that are informative for stabilization and have minimal size. The numerical experiments demonstrate that controller inference with the novel adaptive sampling approach learns controllers with up to one order of magnitude fewer data samples than unguided data generation. The results show that the proposed approach opens the door to stabilizing systems in edge cases and limit states where instabilities often occur and data collection is inherently difficult. Reproducibility of computational results. This paper has been awarded the “SIAM Reproducibility Badge: Code and data available” as a recognition that the authors have followed reproducibility principles valued by SISC and the scientific computing community. Code and data that allow readers to reproduce the results in this paper are available at https://www.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8183173 . [Formula: see text]

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Authors

Researchers on this paper

Steffen W. R. Werner

first | Virginia Tech | ORCID 0000-0003-1667-4862

Benjamin Peherstorfer

last | Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences | ORCID 0000-0002-1558-6775

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Citation

BibTeX

@article{Werner2026Adaptive,
  title = {An Adaptive Data Sampling Strategy for Stabilizing Dynamical Systems via Controller Inference},
  author = {Steffen W. R. Werner and Benjamin Peherstorfer},
  journal = {SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1137/25m176550x},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1137/25m176550x}
}

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