English

Multitask LQG Control: Performance and Generalization Bounds

Optimization and Control 2026-04-21 v1

Abstract

We study multitask learning for stochastic and partially observed control systems, focusing on the linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) problem. Our goal is to learn a common stabilizing controller that generalizes across a distribution of systems and objectives. To this end, we leverage a history-dependent lifting that recasts the multitask LQG problem into an equivalent high-dimensional multitask LQR problem, allowing for the analysis of policy gradient methods. We show that learning a common lifted controller induces a heterogeneity bias which we characterize via a "bisimulation function". We establish performance and generalization guarantees that explicitly depend on such bisimulation-based heterogeneity measures. For model-free, we demonstrate that multitask learning reduces policy gradient estimation variance proportionally to the number of tasks in the training set.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.16730,
  title  = {Multitask LQG Control: Performance and Generalization Bounds},
  author = {Leonardo F. Toso and Kasra Fallah and Charis Stamouli and George J. Pappas and James Anderson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.16730},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:15:32.768Z