Robust Estimation

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Overview

Robust estimation studies how to recover useful parameters, predictions, or system states when measurements may contain outliers, heavy-tailed noise, adversarial contamination, or distribution shifts. Common approaches include median-of-means and other robust aggregation, M-estimators and trimming, filtering, RANSAC-style consensus, and distributionally robust optimization; they are used in regression, mean and covariance estimation, computer vision, and robotics. Researchers analyze finite-sample error and recovery guarantees, and evaluate methods on settings such as contaminated regression data, geometric matching benchmarks, and sensor-fusion tasks. A central tension is limiting the influence of bad data without sacrificing accuracy on clean data, while also keeping methods computationally practical and able to adapt to changing conditions.

Latest papers

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84 papers17 papers in the last four weeks, up 70% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. The German Tank Problem & Navigating by Scent

    Oct 25, 2026Kordel Kade FranceRobot NavigationRobust Estimation

    Scentience, Inc.

  2. Robust Single-Parameter Point Cloud Registration using Truncated Lp Functions

    Oct 25, 2026Seong Hun Lee, Patrick Vandewalle, Javier CiveraPoint Cloud RegistrationRobust Estimation

    I3A, University of Zaragoza, 50018 Zaragoza, Spain · EAVISE, Department of Electrical Engineering, KU Leuven, 2860 Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium

  3. A Nonconvex Framework for Joint Sparse Sample Weighting and Parameter Estimation

    Oct 25, 2026Hassan Nojavan, Chul Moon, Miju AhnInstance ReweightingRobust Estimation

    Department of Operations Research and Engineering Management, Southern Methodist University · Department of Statistics and Data Science, Southern Methodist University

  4. State Estimation as In-context Tabular Prediction

    Oct 23, 2026Ayushi Jolotia, Parikshit PareekRobust Estimation

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee.

  5. Robust Latent Variable Graphical Models: Exact Recovery and Fundamental Limits

    Oct 19, 2026Chuansen Peng, Xiaojing ShenRobust EstimationGraph Structure Learning

    School of Mathematics, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610064, China

  6. Rarity of Singletons Matters & Supplementary Materials

    Oct 15, 2026Pragatheeswaran Vipulanandan, Kamal Premaratne, Dilip SarkarRare-Event EstimationRobust Estimation

    Dept. of Elect. and Comp. Engineering University of Miami Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA · Dept. of Comp. Science University of Miami Coral Gables, FL 33146, USA

  7. Towards Certifiable State Estimation under Observability Degeneracy

    Oct 14, 2026Baoshan SongRobot State EstimationSemidefinite Programming

  8. Contractor Filters

    Oct 13, 2026Simon RohouRobot State EstimationRobust Estimation

    ENSTA, Lab-STICC\_ROBEX

  9. Ellipsoids from Tangents

    Oct 11, 2026Efrat Dahan, Michael WermanRobust Estimation

    School of Computer Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

  10. RobustLDS: Learning linear dynamical systems under adversarial corruptions

    Oct 8, 2026Aravinda Kanchana Ruwanpathirana, Hemant TyagiSystem IdentificationRobust Estimation

    Division of Mathematical Sciences, SPMS, NTU Singapore 637371

  11. Prediction-powered inference for time series across space

    Oct 6, 2026Shahzar Rizvi, David Burt, Vishwak Srinivasan +3Spatiotemporal ForecastingPrediction-Powered Inference

    MIT LIDS · UMass Amherst · Stanford University +1

  12. Robust Local Optimization Done Right

    Oct 5, 2026James Pritts, Kevin KöserRelative Pose EstimationNonconvex Optimization

    Kiel University, Kiel, Germany

  13. Robust Ensemble Guidance for Scientific Inverse Problems

    Oct 4, 2026Zixiang Li, Wei Wang, Yunchao Wei +2Diffusion Model GuidanceDiffusion-Based Inverse Problems

    Beijing Jiaotong University · Tsinghua University

  14. When Can We Trust the Matching Principle? Robust Deployment Geometry Under Finite-Sample and Model Uncertainty

    Oct 2, 2026Vishal RajputRobust EstimationUncertainty Quantification

    Independent researcher Leuven, Belgium

  15. Distributionally Robust Survival Models under Subpopulation Shift and Outlier Contamination

    Oct 2, 2026Seonghwi Kim, Sung Ho Jo, Minwoo ChaeSubgroup RobustnessDistribution Shift Robustness

    Pohang University of Science and Technology

  16. Distributionally robust linear regression through the lens of adversarial training

    Sep 30, 2026Elis Stefansson, David Vävinggren, Antônio H. RibeiroRobust RegressionDistributionally Robust Optimization

    Uppsala University, Sweden · Science for Life Laboratory, Sweden

  17. Superquadric Primitive Decomposition of 3D point clouds via Geometric-Aware Inlier Refinement

    Sep 28, 2026Alessandro Rinaldi, Edoardo Tedesco, Andrea Ferraris +5Point Cloud UnderstandingRobust Estimation

    Department of Informatics, System and Communication, University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy · Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy · Department of Computer Science, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany +1

  18. SeA-RVINS: Semantic-Aware Tightly Coupled RTK-Visual-Inertial System with Correlation-Preserving Robust Estimation for Urban Navigation

    Sep 25, 2026Wang Hu, Bo WuRobot LocalizationVisual-Inertial Odometry

    UC Riverside

  19. GeoACE: Geometry-Diverse Anchor-Correction Ensembles for Heterogeneous Treatment Effect Estimation

    Sep 24, 2026Ali Haghpanah Jahromi, Mohammad Taheri, Zohreh AzimifarConditional Average Treatment Effect EstimationCausal Inference

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shiraz, Shiraz, Iran

  20. Robustness of Diffusion Models under Distribution Shift

    Sep 23, 2026Wei Luo, Neil K. Chada, Shijie Zhang +1Distribution Shift RobustnessDiffusion Sampling

    Department of Mathematical Sciences, Tsinghua University · Department of Mathematics, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR · Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Shenzhen MSU-BIT University +1

  21. Sparse Regression Distilled from a Single Robust Fit

    Sep 20, 2026Wooyoung Shin, Seunghwan ParkRobust RegressionLinear Regression

    Department of Information Statistics, Kangwon National University, 1, Kangwondaehak-gil, Chuncheon-si, Gangwon-do, 24341, Republic of Korea.

  22. Rotation-Based Subspace Tracking for Robust Kernel PCA on Streaming Data

    Sep 14, 2026Kris Lokere, John FossacecaPrincipal Component AnalysisStreaming Algorithms

    Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA · George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

  23. Robust Multi-Model Fitting through Learning Neighbor Regions

    Sep 14, 2026Chang Nie, Guangming Wang, Zhe Liu +1Robust Estimation

    School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China, Shanghai 200240, China · Department of Engineering, Cambridge University, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK

  24. Frequency Estimation Based on SNR-adaptive Frequency Estimator Under Wide SNR Range

    Sep 7, 2026Hee-Yang Jung, Dong-Hee Paek, Woo-Jin Jung +1Parameter EstimationRobust Estimation

    Graduate School of CCS Mobility, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 34051, South Korea · Department of Future Mobility, Korea University, Sejong 30019, Republic of Korea

  25. Robust conditional dimension reduction for dissimilarity data

    Sep 5, 2026Xiao Ling, Anh BuiMultidimensional ScalingDimensionality Reduction

    Department of Mathematics, Auburn University at Montgomery Montgomery, AL 36117, USA · Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Virginia Commonwealth University Richmond, VA 23284, USA

  26. Median-of-Means as an Extremal Convex Estimator and a Nonconvex Route to the Trimmed Oracle

    Sep 1, 2026Angshul MajumdarNonconvex OptimizationRobust Mean Estimation

    Department of Electronics and Communications Engineering, IIIT Delhi, India

  27. DiffSAC: Diffusion-guided Sampling for Consensus-based Robust Estimation

    Aug 31, 2026Chang Nie, Guangming Wang, Zhe Liu +1Diffusion SamplingRobust Estimation

    School of Automation and Intelligent Sensing, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China. · 2Key Laboratory of System Control and Information Processing, Ministry of Education of China, Shanghai, 200240, China. · Department of Engineering, Cambridge University, Cambridge, CB2 1TN, UK.

  28. Maximum Tsallis Entropy Distributions for Robust and Efficient Sparse Learning from Correlated Data

    Aug 18, 2026Kai Yang, Masoud Asgharian, Celia M. T. GreenwoodStatistical Learning TheoryRobust Estimation

  29. On the Brittleness of Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Gaussian Process Hyperparameter Optimization

    Aug 13, 2026Tyler R. Johnson, Kian Ben-Jacob, Christopher P. Muller +1Gaussian ProcessesGaussian Process Regression

    Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Irvine · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine

  30. WRAP: Wasserstein-Robust Adaptive Plug-in for Robot Localization

    Aug 10, 2026Minhyuk Jang, Astghik Hakobyan, Jungjin Lee +2Kalman FilteringRobot Localization

    Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA · Center for Scientific Innovation and Education and the National Polytechnic University of Armenia, Yerevan, Armenia · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Automation and Systems Research Institute, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea