arXiv:2601.00545cs.RO2026-01

提出精确求解混合变量的推断方法,解决机器人中连续与离散变量共存难题。

Variable Elimination in Hybrid Factor Graphs for Discrete-Continuous Inference & Estimation

  • 设计新型混合高斯因子和条件模型,连接离散与连续变量
  • 在条件线性高斯框架下实现精确后验推断,生成混合贝叶斯网络
  • 通过树结构剪枝与概率分配,控制离散假设数量,保证可计算性

机器人中的许多问题同时包含连续与离散成分,将二者联合建模用于估计任务长期存在挑战。混合因子图提供了数学框架,但现有求解方法依赖近似。本文提出一种新框架及新型变量消去算法,可生成混合贝叶斯网络,实现对离散与连续变量的精确最大后验估计与边缘化。首先引入能连接离散与连续变量的混合高斯因子,以及以离散变量为条件的多个连续假设的混合条件表示。在此基础上,基于条件线性高斯方案推导出混合变量消去过程,得到精确后验。为控制离散假设数量,采用树状因子结构结合简单剪枝与概率分配策略,确保推断可行。我们在大规模SLAM数据集和真实世界位姿图优化问题上验证了该框架的有效性,两类任务均涉及模糊测量,需做出离散选择以确定最可能测量结果。实验表明本方法具有高精度、广适应性与简洁性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Many problems in robotics involve both continuous and discrete components, and modeling them together for estimation tasks has been a long standing and difficult problem. Hybrid Factor Graphs give us a mathematical framework to model these types of problems, however existing approaches for solving them are based on approximations. In this work, we propose a new framework for hybrid factor graphs along with a novel variable elimination algorithm to produce a hybrid Bayes network, which can be used for exact Maximum A Posteriori estimation and marginalization over both sets of variables. Our approach first develops a novel hybrid Gaussian factor which can connect to both discrete and continuous variables, and a hybrid conditional which can represent multiple continuous hypotheses conditioned on the discrete variables. Using these representations, we derive the process of hybrid variable elimination under the Conditional Linear Gaussian scheme, giving us exact posteriors as a hybrid Bayes network. To bound the number of discrete hypotheses, we use a tree-structured representation of the factors coupled with a simple pruning and probabilistic assignment scheme, which allows for tractable inference. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework on a large scale SLAM dataset and a real world pose graph optimization problem, both with ambiguous measurements which require discrete choices to be made for the most likely measurements. Our demonstrated results showcase the accuracy, generality, and simplicity of our hybrid factor graph framework.

混合推理因子图精确推断

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