A Data-Enabled Primal-Dual Approach for Policy Learning with SDP Formulations

Han Wang, Feiran Zhao, Florian Dorfler

This paper develops a data-enabled primal-dual framework for learning optimal control policies for unknown linear discrete-time systems from online data. The proposed approach views the data-dependent control synthesis problem as a time-varying semidefinite program (SDP) whose coefficients are recursively updated from online closed-loop measurements. Instead of repeatedly solving a full SDP as new data arrive, the policy is updated online through lightweight primal-dual iterations, each consisting of a linear equation solve and a projection onto the positive semidefinite cone. The framework applies to both direct and indirect data-driven formulations and covers a broad class of control objectives, including LQR, $H_\infty$ control, and safety-critical control. To characterize the coupling between online optimization and closed-loop data generation, we introduce two data-dependent quantities: the Sim-to-Real Gap, which measures the mismatch between noisy and noiseless data-induced SDPs, and the Difference-of-Signal, which measures the temporal variation of the SDP coefficients. Under persistency of excitation, suitable SDP regularity conditions, and sufficiently slow data variation, we establish a local linear tracking result up to residual terms governed by the latter two quantities. A global ergodic convergence bound is also derived for arbitrary initialization. Numerical examples on LQR, $H_\infty$ control, and safe exploration demonstrate that the proposed method can efficiently improve control performance from online data while accommodating SDP constraints beyond the well-explored LQR policy-gradient formulations.