Manifold Navigation Learning Using Recurrent Networks: Efficient Training Techniques

Abstract

Position tracking is a well-studied problem in Euclidean navigation, yet comparatively little attention has been given to navigation on general manifolds, where motion is governed by the underlying geometry of the space. In this work, we formalize the problem of manifold navigation as a velocity-driven tracking task and propose a coordinate-chart-based learning framework in which learning models operate entirely in a Euclidean representation. Predicted trajectories are mapped to the manifold via an immersion function prior to error computation, allowing geometric consistency to be evaluated without explicitly enforcing manifold constraints during learning. Within this framework, we focus on Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) for sequential position prediction on curved manifolds after comparisons with alternative recurrent architectures. We evaluate our GRU models, trained with pertinent custom loss functions, against both a standard MSE loss function and a naive vector-addition baseline. We evaluate our approach on both analytically (and numerically) defined manifolds, as well as a surface reconstructed from a LiDAR point cloud. Our results show that recurrent models can learn to approximate manifold-constrained dynamics from velocity sequences and consistently outperform Euclidean baselines. Our results demonstrate that certain custom loss functions significantly improve long-horizon prediction accuracy compared to conventional point-wise loss functions.