Yuto Watanabe/渡邊優大

Bio

I am a Ph.D. student at the ECE department, University of California San Diego, USA. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yang Zheng. Previously, I obtained the bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kyoto University, where I was working with Prof. Kazunori Sakurama and Prof. Toshiyuki Ohtsuka. I was awarded the 2024 Funai Overseas Scholarship. My research interests include control theory, optimization, and their underlying duality.

In my free time, I enjoy running, juggling, and listening to music.

Research updates

• 2025 April: Check out our new preprint on a primal-dual perspective for LQ differential games and H infinity control! In this work, we present a new proof for solving them from a semidefinite programming and duality perspective.

• 2025 March: Check out our new preprint on a revisit of LQR! This is my first work at UCSD! In this work, we show strong duality of the LQR policy optimization problem, despite the nonconvexity, and provide a more generalized analysis for the gradient dominance. We also provide an SDP and duality-based proof for deriving the analytic solution to LQR! (Also check out this slide!)

Unimportant personal updates

• 2025 May: I finished the La Jolla half marathon with the time 1:39:24 (189/4451)!