Manifold-Guided Stabilization of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems with Diffusion Models

Amartya Mukherjee, Thanin Quartz, Jun Liu

Abstract: This paper introduces Manifold-Guided Stabilizing Control (MGSC), a novel approach to synthesizing stabilizing controllers for nonlinear dynamical systems using diffusion models. Our method formulates control synthesis as a search for the closest asymptotically stable vector field within a learned manifold of stable dynamics. We train a diffusion model on a dataset of asymptotically stable vector fields and employ Tweedie’s estimate to iteratively adjust control parameters, ensuring convergence to a stabilizing controller. This formulation enables zero-shot stabilization for previously unseen systems with significantly reduced computational cost. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that MGSC achieves stabilization in just 16 seconds, compared to 2 minutes in prior work, while generalizing effectively across different nonlinear control problems. These results highlight the potential of diffusion models as a powerful tool for fast, data-driven control synthesis.

External IDs:dblp:conf/amcc/MukherjeeQL25