Identifying latent state transitions in non-linear dynamical systems

This work aims to recover the underlying states and their time evolution in a latent dynamical system from high-dimensional sensory measurements. Previous works on identifiable representation learning in dynamical systems focused on identifying the latent states, often with linear transition approximations. As such, they cannot identify nonlinear transition dynamics, and hence fail to reliably predict complex future behavior. Inspired by the advances in nonlinear ICA, we propose a state-space modeling framework in which we can identify not just the latent states but also the unknown transition function that maps the past states to the present. Our identifiability theory relies on two key assumptions: (i) sufficient variability in the latent noise, and (ii) the bijectivity of the augmented transition function. Drawing from this theory, we introduce a practical algorithm based on variational auto-encoders. We empirically demonstrate that it improves generalization and interpretability of target dynamical systems by (i) recovering latent state dynamics with high accuracy, (ii) correspondingly achieving high future prediction accuracy, and (iii) adapting fast to new environments. Additionally, for complex real-world dynamics, (iv) it produces state-of the-art future prediction results for long horizons, highlighting its usefulness for practical scenarios.