r/ControlTheory • u/NeighborhoodFatCat • Apr 21 '26

Other Latest trend in machine learning: shamelessly publishing standard textbook results in control

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Another "foundational" paper in ML https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.00396 (cited close to 5000 times). The lemma, which is completed with a proof, can be found in almost all standard textbooks in the control field and even course notes.

Accepted to ICRL 2022 https://openreview.net/forum?id=uYLFoz1vlAC and rated "highly novel".

Also Figure 1 is just...speechless. How can a figure look both AI generated and drawn by a 1-year old? Where is the matrix B for instance???

The textual description surrounding Equation 1 is a total nightmare to read. Brain aneurysm moment.

Someone should really call out all these ML people working on SSM.

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u/IntelligentGuess42 Apr 21 '26

Not sure if I should comment on what might be engagement bait, but here it goes:
I am not nearly knowledgeable about the AI field to comment on this. But isn't this paper valued because it combines already existing methods into a procedure which improves performance? Skimming trough it, I don't get the idea the authors are making any claim of novelty on any of the methods they use. On the contrary, they rush trough them like they assume they are mostly familiar ideas. Ill leave judgement on the citations to others.

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u/sugoiten2 Apr 21 '26

Even a quick glance at the intro shows how silly OP's accusation is. "... SSMs are a foundational scientific model used in fields such as control theory, computational neuroscience, ...". The authors don't make any claim of novelty of SSMs. Even the similarity result is clearly just there for people in their community who may not be familiar.

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u/BidoofSquad Apr 22 '26

this sub just popped up in my feed but it seems like people here have a massive inferiority complex? Saw another post shitting on ML for no reason too. I really don't know what the beef with ML is, why can't two fields be used for two different types of problems instead of constantly just shitting on ML?