From Privileged Control to Deployable Adaptation:Fusing Mechanism-Guided Task Reduction with Learned Behavior

Abstract

Simultaneous input-gain variation and large additive disturbance create a control problem in which a fixed observer or nominal controller may be unable to reproduce the performance of a regime-aware design. We study a training--deployment asymmetry: during simulation or commissioning, an expert controller is allowed to use the known gain and disturbance, whereas the deployed controller can use only the reference and measured states. Directly imitating expert actions is generally unsafe because the same instantaneous student observation may correspond to different privileged regimes and hence different expert actions. We propose a mechanism-guided transfer route rather than a new neural architecture. An exact sampled-data identity removes the additive disturbance from the expert law and reduces learning to a task-relevant inverse input gain inferred from causal state history. The latent target is reconstructed from expert actions and deployment-visible trajectories, so the true plant parameter is not required as a student label. A common-quadratic certificate is derived for the actual augmented sampled recursion, followed by explicit residual, coverage, switching, noise, and saturation qualifications. A parameter-regime scan shows that the nominal observer's error grows sharply as $a$ decreases and that the next gain above the best non-failing tuning diverges for every tested $a<1$. Direct action networks also fail in closed loop despite moderate offline error, whereas the structured student remains close to the privileged expert and reduces tracking RMSE by about 69\% relative to the tuned observer in unseen 60-s trials. The contribution is an interpretable design perspective for turning privileged multi-regime control knowledge into a deployable adaptive controller, together with conditions under which the transfer is meaningful.