  Modeling dynamical systems is important in many disciplines, e.g., control,
robotics, or neurotechnology. Commonly the state of these systems is not
directly observed, but only available through noisy and potentially
high-dimensional observations. In these cases, system identification, i.e.,
finding the measurement mapping and the transition mapping (system dynamics) in
latent space can be challenging. For linear system dynamics and measurement
mappings efficient solutions for system identification are available. However,
in practical applications, the linearity assumptions does not hold, requiring
non-linear system identification techniques. If additionally the observations
are high-dimensional (e.g., images), non-linear system identification is
inherently hard. To address the problem of non-linear system identification
from high-dimensional observations, we combine recent advances in deep learning
and system identification. In particular, we jointly learn a low-dimensional
embedding of the observation by means of deep auto-encoders and a predictive
transition model in this low-dimensional space. We demonstrate that our model
enables learning good predictive models of dynamical systems from pixel
information only.
