Robust Automatic Differentiation of Square-Root Kalman Filters via Gramian Differentials

Abstract

Square-root Kalman filters propagate state covariances in Cholesky-factor form for numerical stability, and are a natural target for gradient-based parameter learning in state-space models. Their core operation, triangularization of a matrix M R^n m, is computed via a QR decomposition in practice, but naively differentiating through it causes two problems: the semi-orthogonal factor is non-unique when m > n, yielding undefined gradients; and the standard Jacobian formula involves inverses, which diverges when M is rank-deficient. Both are resolved by the observation that all filter outputs relevant to learning depend on the input matrix only through the Gramian MM^, so the composite loss is smooth in M even where the triangularization is not. We derive a closed-form chain-rule directly from the differential of this Gramian identity, prove it exact for the Kalman log-marginal likelihood and filtered moments, and extend it to rank-deficient inputs via a two-component decomposition: a column-space term based on the Moore--Penrose pseudoinverse, and a null-space correction for perturbations outside the column space of M.

Reproductions