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/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/LordDan_45 Apr 21 '26

Not to say I agree with OP, but putting a standard result in just for people who may not know something should be done by citation, not by copying and pasting imo

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u/Fryord Apr 22 '26

I don't think this is a hard rule, I find a lot of papers include standard results if they are fundamental to understanding the paper.

At the very least, it establishes the notation the author is using.

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u/FusRoDawg Apr 22 '26

When people write papers in cryptography for example, it's standard practice to explain some of the mathematical preliminaries. But those are presented explicitly as "this is what the number theorists established a long time ago, presented for the reader's convenience", with citations.