On the Information Required for Feedback Control

Abstract

Biological systems across scales, along with many engineering problems, must control noisy systems with limited information. Here we study information-limited feedback control of stochastic systems to achieve target steady states, and derive a lower bound on the information rate from controlled system to controller. This framework allows us to obtain performance-information Pareto frontiers for wide-ranging control problems with limited information. For systems with state-independent passive dynamics, the bound is saturated by an explicit optimal control protocol which probabilistically time-reverses the passive dynamics. We showcase these results through applications to nonlinear particle localization, microbial navigation, and experimentally realized information engines.