Max Entropy Moment Kalman Filter for Polynomial Systems with Arbitrary Noise

Designing optimal Bayes filters for nonlinear non-Gaussian systems is a challenging task. The main difficulties are: 1) representing complex beliefs, 2) handling non-Gaussian noise, and 3) marginalizing past states. To address these challenges, we focus on polynomial systems and propose the Max Entropy Moment Kalman Filter (MEM-KF). To address 1), we represent arbitrary beliefs by a Moment-Constrained Max-Entropy Distribution (MED). The MED can asymptotically approximate almost any distribution given an increasing number of moment constraints. To address 2), we model the noise in the process and observation model as MED. To address 3), we propagate the moments through the process model and recover the distribution as MED, thus avoiding symbolic integration, which is generally intractable. All the steps in MEM-KF, including the extraction of a point estimate, can be solved via convex optimization. We showcase the MEM-KF in challenging robotics tasks, such as localization with unknown data association.

@article{teng2025_2506.00838,
  title={ Max Entropy Moment Kalman Filter for Polynomial Systems with Arbitrary Noise },
  author={ Sangli Teng and Harry Zhang and David Jin and Ashkan Jasour and Ram Vasudevan and Maani Ghaffari and Luca Carlone },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.00838},
  year={ 2025 }
}