“…Even though noise and outliers are ubiquitous in geometric vision, and non-convex formulations and their semidefinite relaxations have been widely used in a large body of papers [34,2,25,19,42,16,15,35,8,9,10,48,28,1,38,63,26,27,3,50], much fewer works [17,43,24,49,31,57,62,53,39] 2 provide theoretical insights on the robustness of semidefinite relaxations to noise, only a few semidefinite relaxations [14,36,59,60] are empirically robust to outliers, and only one paper [56] on rotation synchronization gives theoretical guarantees for noise, outliers, and both. Complementary to the story of [52] and inheriting the spirit of [56], in this paper we question whether "a specific semidefinite relaxation" for "robust rotation search" is "tight" or not, and provide tightness characterizations that account for the presence of noise, outliers, and both.…”