Trajectory-Anchor Optimization for Overconfident Thermal Visual Place Recognition: Zero-Leakage OOD Auditing and Kidnapped-Robot Recovery

arXiv:2607.04745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern thermal visual place recognition (TIR-VPR) frontends based on foundation models achieve remarkable closed-set retrieval but suffer from an overconfident forced-matching failure mode. Under out-of-distribution (OOD) or unmapped conditions, they generate highly plausible yet false loop candidates without a drop in similarity scores. While classical multi-hypothesis tracking (MHT) backends can mitigate these ambiguities by maintaining divergent trajectory beliefs, their exponential computational overhead violates real-time robotic constraints. To bridge this gap, we present Trajectory-Anchor Optimization (TAO). To counter the combinatorial challenge of evaluating parallel hypotheses (e.g., K=100), TAO compresses multi-view temporal verification into a batched SE(2) Procrustes alignment problem. By leveraging tensor-level vectorization and single-invocation batched SVD, this formulation bypasses the dynamic tree expansion of MHT, guaranteeing a strictly bounded per-frame execution loop of O(KN). Under a strict zero-leakage evaluation protocol, we show that while a passive geometric backend cannot mathematically separate metric localization errors from coherent hallucinations at a micro-scale (