Abu-Mostafa's 1989 VC-dimension paper and 1992/93 NIPS hints paper independently confirm the same optimal-control/LQG citation absence

yaser-abu-mostafavc-dimensionnipsneuripslearning-theoryoptimal-controllqgcitation-analysisvapnik-chervonenkishistory-of-ml

Two earlier Abu-Mostafa papers extend claim-abu-mostafa-1995-hints-review-cites-no-optimal-control-lqg-source's finding backward across his career. His 1989 "The Vapnik-Chervonenkis Dimension: Information versus Complexity in Learning" (Neural Computation 1(3)) — his foundational statement of the VC-dimension framework — carries a 7-entry reference list: Baum and Haussler (1989), Blumer/Ehrenfeucht/Haussler/Warmuth (1986), Cover (1965), Judd (1988), Rumelhart/Hinton/Williams (1986), Valiant (1984), and Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1971). No control-theory citation appears. His 1992/93 "A Method for Learning from Hints" (NIPS 1992 proceedings, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 5) carries a separate 6-entry list, closing with the same Wismer and Chattergy (1978) Introduction to Nonlinear Optimization citation that recurs in the 1995 review — used there for the paper's "penalty function" approach to weighting error terms, a nonlinear-programming device, not a control-theoretic one. Neither list contains Kalman, Bellman, Pontryagin, Riccati, Bryson, Bryson-Ho, Kwakernaak, Kwakernaak-Sivan, or any "control" title.

Together with the 1995 review, this covers three of Abu-Mostafa's core theoretical statements (1989, 1992/93, 1995) — the primary line of his own VC-dimension and hints contributions — with a consistent negative result across three independently alphabetized reference lists. A weaker, title-level corroboration comes from Abu-Mostafa's self-maintained publications page (work.caltech.edu/pubs.html, Tier 1, undated, ~48 works spanning 1984–2026): no title among them references optimal control, LQG, Kalman filtering, or the Riccati equation — consistent with, but not independent proof beyond, the reference-list reads above.

This is the direct evidence behind question-verify-abu-mostafa-learning-theory-cites-optimal-control-lqg, raised from observation-nips-founders-kwakernaak-twente-founding-cosine-pairing-is-embedding-false-friend. The remaining gap on both the 1995 and this note: Abu-Mostafa's 2012 textbook Learning From Data (with Magdon-Ismail and Lin), his most comprehensive and most-cited theory text, was not obtained this session.