{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/online-incremental-non-gaussian-inference-for","title":"Incremental Non-Gaussian Inference for SLAM Using Normalizing Flows","arxiv_id":"2110.00876","date":"2021-10-02","proceeding":null,"authors":["Qiangqiang Huang","Can Pu","Kasra Khosoussi","David M. Rosen","Dehann Fourie","Jonathan P. How","John J. Leonard"],"abstract":"This paper presents normalizing flows for incremental smoothing and mapping (NF-iSAM), a novel algorithm for inferring the full posterior distribution in SLAM problems with nonlinear measurement models and non-Gaussian factors. NF-iSAM exploits the expressive power of neural networks, and trains normalizing flows to model and sample the full posterior. By leveraging the Bayes tree, NF-iSAM enables efficient incremental updates similar to iSAM2, albeit in the more challenging non-Gaussian setting. We demonstrate the advantages of NF-iSAM over state-of-the-art point and distribution estimation algorithms using range-only SLAM problems with data association ambiguity. NF-iSAM presents superior accuracy in describing the posterior beliefs of continuous variables (e.g., position) and discrete variables (e.g., data association).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.00876v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.00876v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"online-incremental-non-gaussian-inference-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/marineroboticsgroup/nf-isam","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Position"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"normalizing-flows","method_name":"Normalizing Flows"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}