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.

I was born in TOYOTA city, Aichi, Japan, in 1999. Previously, I obtained the bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kyoto University in 2022 and in 2024, respectively, where I was working with Prof. Kazunori Sakurama and Prof. Toshiyuki Ohtsuka. From April 2024 to August 2024, I was a research fellow at Kyoto University funded by the JSPS Research Fellowship for Young Scientist DC1. I was awarded the 2024 Funai Overseas Scholarship. My research interests include control theory, convex and nonconvex optimization, and their underlying duality.

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

Research updates

• 2026 February: Check out our new paper Gradient Dominance in the Linear Quadratic Regulator: A Unified Analysis for Continuous-Time and Discrete-Time Systems. See also [Slides]

• 2026 February: Our paper Revisiting Strong Duality, Hidden Convexity, and Gradient Dominance in the Linear Quadratic Regulator has been accepted to SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization!

• 2026 January: Our paper Policy Optimization in Robust Control: Weak Convexity and Subgradient Methods has been accepted to ACC 2026 and selected as one of the Best Student Paper Finalists. [Slides]

• 2025 December: A talk on Semidefinite Programming Duality in Infinite-Horizon Linear Quadratic Differential Games at IEEE CDC 2025 at Rio, Brazil. [Slides]

• 2025 November: My two previous papers at Kyoto Univ finally got accepted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. I express my deepest thanks to my former advisor, Prof. Sakurama. [URL] [URL]