Global Stabilization of Triangular Systems with Time-Delayed Dynamic Input Perturbations

A control design approach is developed for a general class of uncertain strict-feedback-like nonlinear systems with dynamic uncertain input nonlinearities with time delays. The system structure considered in this paper includes a nominal uncertain strict-feedback-like subsystem, the input signal to which is generated by an uncertain nonlinear input unmodeled dynamics that is driven by the entire system state (including unmeasured state variables) and is also allowed to depend on time delayed versions of the system state variable and control input signals. The system also includes additive uncertain nonlinear functions, coupled nonlinear appended dynamics, and uncertain dynamic input nonlinearities with time-varying uncertain time delays. The proposed control design approach provides a globally stabilizing delay-independent robust adaptive output-feedback dynamic controller based on a dual dynamic high-gain scaling based structure.Comment: 2017 IEEE International Carpathian Control Conference (ICCC

Inventory strategies for patented and generic products for a pharmaceutical supply chain

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-77).This thesis presents a model to determine safety stock considering the distinct planning parameters for a pharmaceutical company. Traditional parameters such as forecast accuracy, service level requirements and average lead-time are combined with a nontraditional upstream uncertainty parameter defined as supply reliability. In this instance, supply reliability measures uncertainty in the supply quantity delivered rather than variability in the lead-time for delivery. We consider the impact of the safety stock using two products: a proprietary product that is patented and a generic product that recently went off patent. Sensitivity analysis is performed to provide insights on the impact of variations in input parameters. The study shows that there is a significant difference in safety stock between the proposed model and the current model used by the company.by Prashanth Krishnamurthy and Amit Prasad.M.Eng.in Logistic

High-Dimensional Controller Tuning through Latent Representations

In this paper, we propose a method to automatically and efficiently tune high-dimensional vectors of controller parameters. The proposed method first learns a mapping from the high-dimensional controller parameter space to a lower dimensional space using a machine learning-based algorithm. This mapping is then utilized in an actor-critic framework using Bayesian optimization (BO). The proposed approach is applicable to complex systems (such as quadruped robots). In addition, the proposed approach also enables efficient generalization to different control tasks while also reducing the number of evaluations required while tuning the controller parameters. We evaluate our method on a legged locomotion application. We show the efficacy of the algorithm in tuning the high-dimensional controller parameters and also reducing the number of evaluations required for the tuning. Moreover, it is shown that the method is successful in generalizing to new tasks and is also transferable to other robot dynamics

Confidence-Aware Safe and Stable Control of Control-Affine Systems

Designing control inputs that satisfy safety requirements is crucial in safety-critical nonlinear control, and this task becomes particularly challenging when full-state measurements are unavailable. In this work, we address the problem of synthesizing safe and stable control for control-affine systems via output feedback (using an observer) while reducing the estimation error of the observer. To achieve this, we adapt control Lyapunov function (CLF) and control barrier function (CBF) techniques to the output feedback setting. Building upon the existing CLF-CBF-QP (Quadratic Program) and CBF-QP frameworks, we formulate two confidence-aware optimization problems and establish the Lipschitz continuity of the obtained solutions. To validate our approach, we conduct simulation studies on two illustrative examples. The simulation studies indicate both improvements in the observer's estimation accuracy and the fulfillment of safety and control requirements.Comment: Accepted at the 2024 American Control Conference (ACC

Prescribed-Time Stability Properties of Interconnected Systems

Achieving control objectives (e.g., stabilization or convergence of tracking error to zero, input-to-state stabilization) in "prescribed time" has attracted significant research interest in recent years. The key property of prescribed-time results unlike traditional "asymptotic" results is that the convergence or other control objectives are achieved within an arbitrary designer-specified time interval instead of asymptotically as time goes to infinity. In this paper, we consider cascade and feedback interconnections of prescribed-time input-to-state stable (ISS) systems and study conditions under which the overall states of such interconnected systems also converge to the origin in the prescribed time interval. We show that these conditions are intrinsically related to properties of the time-varying "blow-up" functions that are central to prescribed-time control designs. We also generalize the results to interconnections of an arbitrary number of systems. As an illustrative example, we consider an interconnection of two uncertain systems that are prescribed-time stabilized using two different control design methods and show that the two separate controllers can be put together to achieve prescribed-time stability of the interconnected system.Comment: 2 figure

Differential Analysis of Triggers and Benign Features for Black-Box DNN Backdoor Detection

This paper proposes a data-efficient detection method for deep neural networks against backdoor attacks under a black-box scenario. The proposed approach is motivated by the intuition that features corresponding to triggers have a higher influence in determining the backdoored network output than any other benign features. To quantitatively measure the effects of triggers and benign features on determining the backdoored network output, we introduce five metrics. To calculate the five-metric values for a given input, we first generate several synthetic samples by injecting the input's partial contents into clean validation samples. Then, the five metrics are computed by using the output labels of the corresponding synthetic samples. One contribution of this work is the use of a tiny clean validation dataset. Having the computed five metrics, five novelty detectors are trained from the validation dataset. A meta novelty detector fuses the output of the five trained novelty detectors to generate a meta confidence score. During online testing, our method determines if online samples are poisoned or not via assessing their meta confidence scores output by the meta novelty detector. We show the efficacy of our methodology through a broad range of backdoor attacks, including ablation studies and comparison to existing approaches. Our methodology is promising since the proposed five metrics quantify the inherent differences between clean and poisoned samples. Additionally, our detection method can be incrementally improved by appending more metrics that may be proposed to address future advanced attacks.Comment: Published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit

A Deep Neural Network Algorithm for Linear-Quadratic Portfolio Optimization with MGARCH and Small Transaction Costs

We analyze a fixed-point algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) of optimal portfolio mean-variance preferences in the setting of multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional-heteroskedasticity (MGARCH) with a small penalty on trading. A numerical solution is obtained using a neural network (NN) architecture within a recursive RL loop. A fixed-point theorem proves that NN approximation error has a big-oh bound that we can reduce by increasing the number of NN parameters. The functional form of the trading penalty has a parameter $\epsilon>0$ that controls the magnitude of transaction costs. When $\epsilon$ is small, we can implement an NN algorithm based on the expansion of the solution in powers of $\epsilon$. This expansion has a base term equal to a myopic solution with an explicit form, and a first-order correction term that we compute in the RL loop. Our expansion-based algorithm is stable, allows for fast computation, and outputs a solution that shows positive testing performance