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conference paper

Data-driven Distributionally Robust Control Based on Sinkhorn Ambiguity Sets

Cescon, Riccardo  
•
Martin, Andrea  
•
Ferrari Trecate, Giancarlo  
December 9, 2025
2025 IEEE 64th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)
2025 IEEE 64th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)

As the complexity of modern control systems increases, it becomes challenging to derive an accurate model of the uncertainty that affects their dynamics. Wasserstein Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) provides a powerful framework for decision-making under distributional uncertainty only using noise samples. However, while the resulting policies inherit strong probabilistic guarantees when the number of samples is sufficiently high, their performance may significantly degrade when only a few data are available. Inspired by recent results from the machine learning community, we introduce an entropic regularization to penalize deviations from a given reference distribution and study data-driven DR control over Sinkhorn ambiguity sets. We show that for finite-horizon control problems, the optimal DR linear policy can be computed via convex programming. By analyzing the relation between the ambiguity set defined in terms of Wasserstein and Sinkhorn discrepancies, we reveal that, as the regularization parameter increases, this optimal policy interpolates between the solution of the Wasserstein DR problem and that of the stochastic problem under the reference distribution. We validate our theoretical findings and the effectiveness of our approach when only scarce data are available on a numerical example.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1109/cdc57313.2025.11312633
Author(s)
Cescon, Riccardo  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Martin, Andrea  

EPFL

Ferrari Trecate, Giancarlo  

EPFL

Date Issued

2025-12-09

Publisher

IEEE

Published in
2025 IEEE 64th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)
DOI of the book
10.1109/CDC57313.2025
Start page

4708

End page

4713

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
SCI-STI-GFT  
Event nameEvent acronymEvent placeEvent date
2025 IEEE 64th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

2025-12-09 - 2025-12-12

FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

National Science Foundation

10.1109/CDC57313.2025

Available on Infoscience
January 15, 2026
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/258036
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