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Main Authors: Kaparounakis, Orestis, Zhang, Yunqi, Stanley-Marbell, Phillip
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01023
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author Kaparounakis, Orestis
Zhang, Yunqi
Stanley-Marbell, Phillip
author_facet Kaparounakis, Orestis
Zhang, Yunqi
Stanley-Marbell, Phillip
contents Particle filtering algorithms have enabled practical solutions to problems in autonomous robotics (self-driving cars, UAVs, warehouse robots), target tracking, and econometrics, with further applications in speech processing and medicine (patient monitoring). Yet, their inherent weakness at representing the likelihood of the observation (which often leads to particle degeneracy) remains unaddressed for real-time resource-constrained systems. Improvements such as the optimal proposal and auxiliary particle filter mitigate this issue under specific circumstances and with increased computational cost. This work presents a new particle filtering method and its implementation, which enables tunably-approximative representation of arbitrary likelihood densities as program transformations of parametric distributions. Our method leverages a recent computing platform thatcan perform deterministic computation on probability distributionrepresentations (UxHw) without relying on stochastic methods. For non-Gaussian non-linear systems and with an optimal-auxiliary particle filter, we benchmark the likelihood evaluation error and speed for a total of 294840 evaluation points. For such models, the results show that the UxHw method leads to as much as 37.7x speedup compared to the Monte Carlo alternative. For narrow uniform measurement uncertainty, the particle filter falsely assigns zero likelihood as much as 81.89% of the time whereas UxHw achieves 1.52% false-zero rate. The UxHw approach achieves filter RMSE improvement of as much as 18.9% (average 3.3%) over the Monte Carlo alternative.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01023
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Approximating Analytically-Intractable Likelihood Densities with Deterministic Arithmetic for Optimal Particle Filtering
Kaparounakis, Orestis
Zhang, Yunqi
Stanley-Marbell, Phillip
Systems and Control
Signal Processing
62F15 (Primary), 62G86, 93E10, 62G05 (Secondary)
G.3; C.1.3; C.3; J.7
Particle filtering algorithms have enabled practical solutions to problems in autonomous robotics (self-driving cars, UAVs, warehouse robots), target tracking, and econometrics, with further applications in speech processing and medicine (patient monitoring). Yet, their inherent weakness at representing the likelihood of the observation (which often leads to particle degeneracy) remains unaddressed for real-time resource-constrained systems. Improvements such as the optimal proposal and auxiliary particle filter mitigate this issue under specific circumstances and with increased computational cost. This work presents a new particle filtering method and its implementation, which enables tunably-approximative representation of arbitrary likelihood densities as program transformations of parametric distributions. Our method leverages a recent computing platform thatcan perform deterministic computation on probability distributionrepresentations (UxHw) without relying on stochastic methods. For non-Gaussian non-linear systems and with an optimal-auxiliary particle filter, we benchmark the likelihood evaluation error and speed for a total of 294840 evaluation points. For such models, the results show that the UxHw method leads to as much as 37.7x speedup compared to the Monte Carlo alternative. For narrow uniform measurement uncertainty, the particle filter falsely assigns zero likelihood as much as 81.89% of the time whereas UxHw achieves 1.52% false-zero rate. The UxHw approach achieves filter RMSE improvement of as much as 18.9% (average 3.3%) over the Monte Carlo alternative.
title Approximating Analytically-Intractable Likelihood Densities with Deterministic Arithmetic for Optimal Particle Filtering
topic Systems and Control
Signal Processing
62F15 (Primary), 62G86, 93E10, 62G05 (Secondary)
G.3; C.1.3; C.3; J.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01023