Dimension-free Regret for Learning Asymmetric Linear Dynamical Systems

Previously, methods for learning marginally stable linear dynamical systems either required the transition matrix to be symmetric or incurred regret bounds that scale polynomially with the system's hidden dimension. In this work, we introduce a novel method that overcomes this trade-off, achieving dimension-free regret despite the presence of asymmetric matrices and marginal stability. Our method combines spectral filtering with linear predictors and employs Chebyshev polynomials in the complex plane to construct a novel spectral filtering basis. This construction guarantees sublinear regret in an online learning framework, without relying on any statistical or generative assumptions. Specifically, we prove that as long as the transition matrix has eigenvalues with complex component bounded by $1/\mathrm{poly} \log T$, then our method achieves regret $\tilde{O}(T^{9/10})$ when compared to the best linear dynamical predictor in hindsight.

@article{marsden2025_2502.06545,
  title={ Dimension-free Regret for Learning Asymmetric Linear Dynamical Systems },
  author={ Annie Marsden and Elad Hazan },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.06545},
  year={ 2025 }
}