Distribution Estimation for Global Data Association via Approximate Bayesian Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jia, Yixuan, Peterson, Mason B., Li, Qingyuan, Tian, Yulun, How, Jonathan P.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Jia, Yixuan
Peterson, Mason B.
Li, Qingyuan
Tian, Yulun
How, Jonathan P.
author_facet Jia, Yixuan
Peterson, Mason B.
Li, Qingyuan
Tian, Yulun
How, Jonathan P.
contents Global data association is an essential prerequisite for robot operation in environments seen at different times or by different robots. Repetitive or symmetric data creates significant challenges for existing methods, which typically rely on maximum likelihood estimation or maximum consensus to produce a single set of associations. However, in ambiguous scenarios, the distribution of solutions to global data association problems is often highly multimodal, and such single-solution approaches frequently fail. In this work, we introduce a data association framework that leverages approximate Bayesian inference to capture multiple solution modes to the data association problem, thereby avoiding premature commitment to a single solution under ambiguity. Our approach represents hypothetical solutions as particles that evolve according to a deterministic or randomized update rule to cover the modes of the underlying solution distribution. Furthermore, we show that our method can incorporate optimization constraints imposed by the data association formulation and directly benefit from GPU-parallelized optimization. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments with highly ambiguous data show that our method correctly estimates the distribution over transformations when registering point clouds or object maps.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15565
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Distribution Estimation for Global Data Association via Approximate Bayesian Inference
Jia, Yixuan
Peterson, Mason B.
Li, Qingyuan
Tian, Yulun
How, Jonathan P.
Robotics
Global data association is an essential prerequisite for robot operation in environments seen at different times or by different robots. Repetitive or symmetric data creates significant challenges for existing methods, which typically rely on maximum likelihood estimation or maximum consensus to produce a single set of associations. However, in ambiguous scenarios, the distribution of solutions to global data association problems is often highly multimodal, and such single-solution approaches frequently fail. In this work, we introduce a data association framework that leverages approximate Bayesian inference to capture multiple solution modes to the data association problem, thereby avoiding premature commitment to a single solution under ambiguity. Our approach represents hypothetical solutions as particles that evolve according to a deterministic or randomized update rule to cover the modes of the underlying solution distribution. Furthermore, we show that our method can incorporate optimization constraints imposed by the data association formulation and directly benefit from GPU-parallelized optimization. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments with highly ambiguous data show that our method correctly estimates the distribution over transformations when registering point clouds or object maps.
title Distribution Estimation for Global Data Association via Approximate Bayesian Inference
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15565