Special Section on Intersection of Machine Learning with Control

Editor: Maxim Raginsky
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
United States
http://maxim.ece.illinois.edu/
maxim@illinois.edu

Submission Window: 30 Sept 2026 – 15 May 2027

The scientific and technological impact of machine learning and artificial intelligence continues to reverberate through all areas of science and engineering. As learning-enabled systems are increasingly deployed in complex operating environments, there is a growing need for formal guarantees for these systems in a wide range of applications, from mainstream to critical. Prime examples are physical control systems, such as autonomous systems (e.g., self-driving cars). Another example is the growing prominence of large language models, which combine continuous and discrete (symbolic) dynamics and are increasingly interconnected in a closed-loop fashion with physical control systems, such as robots. These challenges open new directions in control systems. This special section of the IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems aims to contribute to this growing area of interest and thus calls for papers situated at the intersection of machine learning and control.

Prospective authors are invited to submit original contributions on related topics including, but not limited to, the following:

  > Emerging theory and applications for learning-based control
  > Data-driven optimization and control for dynamical systems
  > Safe reinforcement learning and safe adaptive control
  > Bridging model-based and learning-based control systems
  > Distributed learning for multi-agent systems, including reinforcement learning
  > Optimization, dynamics and control for machine learning
  > Analysis of capabilities and fundamental limits of machine learning through the lens of control systems
  > Analysis of large language models from a control and dynamical systems perspective
  > Formal guarantees for physical artificial intelligence

Special Section Schedule:

  > Special Section Submission Window: 30 September 2026 – 15 May 2027
  > Notification of reviews of and recommendations: 10 weeks after initial submission
  > Final notification of regular papers: 20 weeks after initial submission
  > Manuscript publication on IEEE Xplore: 24 weeks after initial submission

Submission Site: https://css.paperplaza.net/journals/ojcs/scripts/login.pl
Length: 10-15 pages, not including references. Justification of longer papers is required.
Discounts: 50% discounts on APCs are available for the first several papers published in this special section. For more information, contact the the editorial assistant.

Guest Senior Editor

Name: Maxim Raginsky
Affiliation: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States

Guest Associate Editors

Name: Anastasia Bizyaeva
Affiliation: Cornell University, United States

Name: Bahman Gharesifard
Affiliation: Queen’s University, Canada

Name: Bin Hu
Affiliation: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States

Name: Victoria Kostina
Affiliation: California Institute of Technology, United States

Name: Mahyar Fazlyab
Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University, United States

Name: Nikolai Matni
Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania, United States

Name: Patricia Pauli
Affiliation: Eindhoven Institute of Technology, Netherlands

Name: Jerome Le Ny
Affiliation: Polytechnique Montréal, Canada

Name: Negar Mehr
Affiliation: University of California Berkeley, United States