ArXiv · 2026
Many engineered physical processes exhibit nonlinear but asymptotically stable dynamics that converge to a finite set of equilibria determined by control inputs. Identifying such systems from data is challenging: stable dynamics provide limited excitation and model discovery is often non-unique. We propose a minimally structured Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) architecture that enforces trajectory stability and provides a tractable parameterization for multistable systems, by learning a vector field in the form F(x,u) = f(x) (x - g(x,u)), where f(x) < 0 elementwise ensures contraction and g(x,u) determines the multi-attractor locations. Across several nonlinear benchmarks, the proposed structure is efficient on short time horizon training, captures multiple basins of attraction, and enables efficient gradient-based feedback control through the implicit equilibrium map g.
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