用控制理论优化时间序列建模,让模型更稳定可靠。
Neural Predictive Control to Coordinate Discrete- and Continuous-Time Models for Time-Series Analysis with Control-Theoretical Improvements
- 将时间序列问题转化为连续微分方程的最优控制问题
- 多步预测优化实现指数级收敛,提升长期泛化能力
- 适合需要鲁棒性的时序预测与动态系统建模场景
深度序列模型在时间序列分析中表现优异,如插值与预测。近年来研究从离散时间架构(如RNN)转向连续时间形式(如神经微分方程,Neural ODEs),发现捕捉底层动态对插值、外推和分类等任务有益。然而,现有方法使用无约束神经网络近似动态,难以应对分布漂移。本文将时间序列问题重构为基于连续常微分方程的最优控制问题:不只从数据学习动态,而是通过优化控制动作引导微分方程轨迹达成任务目标,带来控制理论上的性能保证。为此,需设计合适控制动作并应用高效最优控制算法。由于动作需包含丰富上下文信息,我们采用离散时间模型处理历史序列生成动作,构建协调模型以提取长期时序特征,调控短期连续动态。训练中采用模型预测控制,规划多步未来轨迹,最小化任务相关代价,并贪婪选择最优当前动作。在温和假设下,多时域优化可实现指数收敛至无限时域解,表明该协调模型具备稳健且泛化能力强。在多种时间序列数据集上的大量实验验证了该方法优于当前最先进基线,具有更强泛化性与适应性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deep sequence models have achieved notable success in time-series analysis, such as interpolation and forecasting. Recent advances move beyond discrete-time architectures like Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) toward continuous-time formulations such as the family of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (Neural ODEs). Generally, they have shown that capturing the underlying dynamics is beneficial for generic tasks like interpolation, extrapolation, and classification. However, existing methods approximate the dynamics using unconstrained neural networks, which struggle to adapt reliably under distributional shifts. In this paper, we recast time-series problems as the continuous ODE-based optimal control problem. Rather than learning dynamics solely from data, we optimize control actions that steer ODE trajectories toward task objectives, bringing control-theoretical performance guarantees. To achieve this goal, we need to (1) design the appropriate control actions and (2) apply effective optimal control algorithms. As the actions should contain rich context information, we propose to employ the discrete-time model to process past sequences and generate actions, leading to a coordinate model to extract long-term temporal features to modulate short-term continuous dynamics. During training, we apply model predictive control to plan multi-step future trajectories, minimize a task-specific cost, and greedily select the optimal current action. We show that, under mild assumptions, this multi-horizon optimization leads to exponential convergence to infinite-horizon solutions, indicating that the coordinate model can gain robust and generalizable performance. Extensive experiments on diverse time-series datasets validate our method's superior generalization and adaptability compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
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