cs.ROFeb 22, 2026

Distributional Stability of Tangent-Linearized Gaussian Inference on Smooth Manifolds

Authors: Junghoon Seo, Hakjin Lee, Jaehoon Sim

Organizations: AI Robot Team, PIT IN Corp., South Korea.

Abstract

Gaussian inference on smooth manifolds is central to robotics, but exact marginalization and conditioning are generally non-Gaussian and geometry-dependent. We study tangent-linearized Gaussian inference and derive explicit non-asymptotic W2W_2 stability bounds for projection marginalization and surface-measure conditioning. The bounds separate local second-order geometric distortion from nonlocal tail leakage and, for Gaussian inputs, yield closed-form diagnostics from (μ,Σ)(μ,Σ) and curvature/reach surrogates. Circle and planar-pushing experiments validate the predicted calibration transition near ∥Σ∥op/R≈1/6\sqrt{\|Σ\|_{\mathrm{op}}}/R\approx 1/6 and indicate that normal-direction uncertainty is the dominant failure mode when locality breaks. These diagnostics provide practical triggers for switching from single-chart linearization to multi-chart or sample-based manifold inference. Code and Jupyter notebooks are available at https://github.com/mikigom/StabilityTLGaussian.

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