Clara Lucía Galimberti | EPFL Graph Search

Clara Galimberti is a PhD student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) under the supervision of Professor Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate. She received her degree in Electronic Engineering from Universidad Nacional de Rosario (UNR), Argentina, in 2018. Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning and control theory. Currently, she is working on the development of deep networks inspired by dynamical systems and the study of their utilization for the control of complex systems while guaranteeing stability of the closed-loop dynamics, even during the learning phase.

Hamiltonian Deep Neural Networks Guaranteeing Non-Vanishing Gradients by Design

Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate, Luca Furieri, Clara Lucía Galimberti, Liang Xu

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training can be difficult due to vanishing and exploding gradients during weight optimization through backpropagation. To address this problem, we propose a general class of Hamiltonian DNNs (H-DNNs) that stem from the discretization of continuous-time Hamiltonian systems and include several existing DNN architectures based on ordinary differential equations. Our main result is that a broad set of H-DNNs ensures non-vanishing gradients by design for an arbitrary network depth. This is obtained by proving that, using a semi-implicit Euler discretization scheme, the backward sensitivity matrices involved in gradient computations are symplectic. We also provide an upper-bound to the magnitude of sensitivity matrices and show that exploding gradients can be controlled through regularization. The good performance of H-DNNs is demonstrated on benchmark classification problems, including image classification with the MNIST dataset.

2023

Distributed neural network control with dependability guarantees: a compositional port-Hamiltonian approach

Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate, Luca Furieri, Clara Lucía Galimberti, Muhammad Zakwan

Large-scale cyber-physical systems require that control policies are distributed, that is, that they only rely on local real-time measurements and communication with neighboring agents. Optimal Distributed Control (ODC) problems are, however, highly intractable even in seemingly simple cases. Recent work has thus proposed training Neural Network (NN) distributed controllers. A main challenge of NN controllers is that they are not dependable during and after training, that is, the closed-loop system may be unstable, and the training may fail due to vanishing gradients. In this paper, we address these issues for networks of nonlinear port-Hamiltonian (pH) systems, whose modeling power ranges from energy systems to non-holonomic vehicles and chemical reactions. Specifically, we embrace the compositional properties of pH systems to characterize deep Hamiltonian control policies with built-in closed-loop stability guarantees — irrespective of the interconnection topology and the chosen NN parameters. Furthermore, our setup enables leveraging recent results on well-behaved neural ODEs to prevent the phenomenon of vanishing gradients by design. Numerical experiments corroborate the dependability of the proposed architecture, while matching the performance of general neural network policies.

2022

Neural System Level Synthesis: Learning over All Stabilizing Policies for Nonlinear Systems

Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate, Luca Furieri, Clara Lucía Galimberti

We address the problem of designing stabilizing control policies for nonlinear systems in discrete-time, while minimizing an arbitrary cost function. When the system is linear and the cost is convex, the System Level Synthesis (SLS) approach offers an effective solution based on convex programming. Beyond this case, a globally optimal solution cannot be found in a tractable way, in general. In this paper, we develop a parametrization of all and only the control policies stabilizing a given time-varying nonlinear system in terms of the combined effect of 1) a strongly stabilizing base controller and 2) a stable SLS operator to be freely designed. Based on this result, we propose a Neural SLS (NeurSLS) approach guaranteeing closed-loop stability during and after parameter optimization, without requiring any constraints to be satisfied. We exploit recent Deep Neural Network (DNN) models based on Recurrent Equilibrium Networks (RENs) to learn over a rich class of nonlinear stable operators, and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in numerical examples.

IEEE2022