Constrained Diffusion for Data-Scarce Orbital Monte Carlo in Constellation Tasking
Abstract
Constellation Monte Carlo results depend on the orbital population used to evaluate a tasking policy. With scarce reference trajectories, replay limits geometric diversity, while independent orbital-element jitter can violate physical constraints. We study constrained diffusion for orbital-population augmentation. A force-conditioned diffusion model learns a 13-dimensional orbital prior, recovering semimajor axis from perigee altitude and eccentricity; Basilisk propagates each sample under one of five force-model tiers. Using 800 reference trajectories, we compare diffusion with jittered bootstrap, per-tier Gaussian mixtures, and a conditional variational autoencoder, and evaluate distributional fidelity, support shift, classical astrodynamics diagnostics, and 4,000 paired GoDSAT-compatible campaigns. The largest diffusion model achieves held-out trajectory MMD of 0.0171 +/- 0.0239, similar to bootstrap (0.0170) and the mixture (0.0198), but samples farther from training priors (median nearest-training distance 2.7 versus 0.10 standardized units). All generators fail to match the shifted-blind population (classifier AUC 0.991-0.998). Endpoint-conditioned samples satisfy Lambert boundaries but have greater interior error than the matched Lambert reference (29.2 versus 5.7 km mean RMSE). Residual diffusion improves selected sparse forecasts and catalog-mode recall but does not outperform classical estimators on custody ranking. In a fixed 16-satellite configuration, diffusion yields similar mean custody to replay and bootstrap, while the force-tier mixture shifts custody by about 5.5 percentage points. Constrained diffusion supports local, in-support augmentation but cannot replace orbital dynamics or serve as an operational posterior. Orbital-population construction is a consequential source of uncertainty in constellation analysis.
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BibTeX
@misc{ramadan2026constrained,
title = {{Constrained Diffusion for Data-Scarce Orbital Monte Carlo in Constellation Tasking}},
author = {Omar Ramadan and Sam Siavoshian and Amir Kashif Saeed and Benjamin A. Johnson and Amin M. E. -A. Diab and Benjamin M. Rodriguez},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.09323},
eprint = {2610.09323},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09323},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Constrained Diffusion for Data-Scarce Orbital Monte Carlo in Constellation Tasking
AU - Omar Ramadan
AU - Sam Siavoshian
AU - Amir Kashif Saeed
AU - Benjamin A. Johnson
AU - Amin M. E. -A. Diab
AU - Benjamin M. Rodriguez
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/07
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.09323
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09323
AB - Constellation Monte Carlo results depend on the orbital population used to evaluate a tasking policy. With scarce reference trajectories, replay limits geometric diversity, while independent orbital-element jitter can violate physical constraints. We study constrained diffusion for orbital-population augmentation. A force-conditioned diffusion model learns a 13-dimensional orbital prior, recovering semimajor axis from perigee altitude and eccentricity; Basilisk propagates each sample under one of five force-model tiers. Using 800 reference trajectories, we compare diffusion with jittered bootstrap, per-tier Gaussian mixtures, and a conditional variational autoencoder, and evaluate distributional fidelity, support shift, classical astrodynamics diagnostics, and 4,000 paired GoDSAT-compatible campaigns. The largest diffusion model achieves held-out trajectory MMD of 0.0171 +/- 0.0239, similar to bootstrap (0.0170) and the mixture (0.0198), but samples farther from training priors (median nearest-training distance 2.7 versus 0.10 standardized units). All generators fail to match the shifted-blind population (classifier AUC 0.991-0.998). Endpoint-conditioned samples satisfy Lambert boundaries but have greater interior error than the matched Lambert reference (29.2 versus 5.7 km mean RMSE). Residual diffusion improves selected sparse forecasts and catalog-mode recall but does not outperform classical estimators on custody ranking. In a fixed 16-satellite configuration, diffusion yields similar mean custody to replay and bootstrap, while the force-tier mixture shifts custody by about 5.5 percentage points. Constrained diffusion supports local, in-support augmentation but cannot replace orbital dynamics or serve as an operational posterior. Orbital-population construction is a consequential source of uncertainty in constellation analysis.
ER -