As advancements in technologies like Internet of Things (IoT), Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speaker Verification (SV), and Text-to-Speech (TTS) lead to increased usage of intelligent voice assistants, the demand for privacy and personalization has escalated. In this paper, we introduce a multi-task learning framework for personalized, customizable open-vocabulary Keyword Spotting (PCOV-KWS). This framework employs a lightweight network to simultaneously perform Keyword Spotting (KWS) and SV to address personalized KWS requirements. We have integrated a training criterion distinct from softmax-based loss, transforming multi-class classification into multiple binary classifications, which eliminates inter-category competition, while an optimization strategy for multi-task loss weighting is employed during training. We evaluated our PCOV-KWS system in multiple datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms the baselines in evaluation results, while also requiring fewer parameters and lower computational resources.

Current keyword spotting systems primarily use phoneme-level matching to distinguish confusable words but ignore user-specific pronunciation traits like prosody (intonation, stress, rhythm). This paper presents ProKWS, a novel framework integrating fine-grained phoneme learning with personalized prosody modeling. We design a dual-stream encoder where one stream derives robust phonemic representations through contrastive learning, while the other extracts speaker-specific prosodic patterns. A collaborative fusion module dynamically combines phonemic and prosodic information, enhancing adaptability across acoustic environments. Experiments show ProKWS delivers highly competitive performance, comparable to state-of-the-art models on standard benchmarks and demonstrates strong robustness for personalized keywords with tone and intent variations.

Digital twins, virtual simulated replicas of physical scenes, are transforming system design across industries. However, their potential in radio frequency (RF) systems has been limited by the non-differentiable nature of conventional RF simulators. The visibility of propagation paths causes severe discontinuities, and differentiable rendering techniques from computer graphics cannot easily transfer due to point-source antennas and dominant specular reflections. In this paper, we present RFDT, a physically based differentiable RF simulation framework that enables gradient-based interaction between virtual and physical worlds. RFDT resolves discontinuities with a physically grounded edge-diffraction transition function, and mitigates non-convexity from Fourier-domain processing through a signal domain transform surrogate. Our implementation demonstrates RFDT's ability to accurately reconstruct digital twins from real RF measurements. Moreover, RFDT can augment diverse downstream applications, such as test-time adaptation of machine learning-based RF sensing and physically constrained optimization of communication systems.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) indoor localization provides centimeter-level accuracy and low latency, but its measurement reliability degrades severely under Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) conditions, leading to meter-scale ranging errors and inconsistent uncertainty characteristics. Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) complements UWB by providing infrastructure-free motion estimation; however, its error accumulates nonlinearly over time due to bias and noise propagation. Fusion methods based on Extended Kalman Filters (EKF) and Particle Filters (PF) can improve average localization accuracy through probabilistic state estimation. However, these approaches typically rely on manually tuned measurement covariances. Such fixed or heuristically tuned parameters are hard to sustain across varying indoor layouts, NLOS ratios, and motion patterns, leading to limited robustness and poor generalization of measurement uncertainty modeling in heterogeneous environments. To address this limitation, this work proposes an adaptive measurement covariance scaling framework in which reliability cues are learned from historical UWB/PDR trajectories. A large teacher model is employed offline to generate temporally consistent next-position predictions from structured UWB/PDR sequences, and this behavior is distilled into a lightweight student model suitable for real-time deployment. The student model continuously regulates EKF measurement covariances based on prediction residuals, enabling environment-aware fusion without manual re-tuning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed KD-EKF framework significantly reduces localization error, suppresses error spikes during Line-of-Sight (LOS)/NLOS transitions, and mitigates long-term drift compared to fixed-parameter EKF, thereby improving measurement robustness across diverse indoor environments.

Accurate segmentation of brain images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans plays a pivotal role in brain image analysis and the diagnosis of neurological disorders. Deep learning algorithms, particularly U-Net and U-Net++, are widely used for image segmentation. However, it finds difficult to deal with uncertainty in images. To address this challenge, this work integrates intuitionistic fuzzy logic into U-Net and U-Net++, propose a novel framework, named as IFS U-Net and IFS U-Net++. These models accept input data in an intuitionistic fuzzy representation to manage uncertainty arising from vague ness and imprecise data. This approach effectively handles tissue ambiguity caused by the partial volume effect and boundary uncertainties. To evaluate the effectiveness of IFS U-Net and IFS U-Net++, experiments are conducted on two publicly available MRI brain datasets: the Internet Brain Segmentation Repository (IBSR) and the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS). Segmentation performance is quantitatively assessed using Accuracy, Dice Coefficient, and Intersection over Union (IoU). The results demonstrate that the proposed architectures consistently improve segmentation performance by effectively addressing uncertainty

Quality assessment of brain structural MR images is critical for large-scale neuroimaging studies, where motion artifacts can significantly bias clinical estimates. While visual rating remains the gold standard, it is time-consuming and subjective. This study evaluates the relative performance and generalization capabilities of two prominent Automated Quality Assessment (AQA) methods: MRIQC, which uses hand-crafted image-quality metrics with traditional machine learning, and CNNQC, which utilizes a deep learning (DL) architecture. Using a heterogeneous dataset of 1,098 T1-weighted volumes from 17 different sites, we assessed performance on both seen sites and entirely new sites using a leave-one-site-out (LOSO) approach. Our results indicate that both DL and traditional ML methods struggle to generalize to new scanners or sites. While MRIQC generally achieved higher accuracy across most unseen sites, CNNQC demonstrated higher sensitivity for detecting poor-quality scans. Given that DL-based methods like CNNQC offer higher computational efficiency and do not require expensive pre-processing, they may be preferred for widespread deployment, provided that future work focuses on improving cross-site generalizability.

This letter presents a novel control solution to the robust global position and heading tracking problem for underactuated vehicles, equipped with single-axis thrust and full torque actuation, operating under strict, user-defined actuation limits. The architecture features a saturated position tracking controller augmented with two first-order filters. This formulation ensures the boundedness of the first and second derivatives, yielding less conservative bounds and systematically generating bounded attitude references whose limits are easily tuned via design parameters. To track these dynamic references, the inner loop comprises a saturated, modified Rodrigues parameter (MRP)-based controller paired with a hybrid dynamic path-lifting mechanism. This approach allows the attitude tracking law to be designed on a covering space of the configuration manifold. By leveraging a stability equivalence framework, the methodology establishes that the resulting interconnected system achieves robust global asymptotic and semi-global exponential tracking on SE(3), while complying with user-defined input saturation bounds. Numerical simulations validate the proposed solution.

Congenital heart disease (CHD) screening from fetal echocardiography requires accurate analysis of multiple standard cardiac views, yet developing reliable artificial intelligence models remains challenging due to limited annotations and variable image quality. In this work, we propose FM-DACL, a semi-supervised Dual Agreement Consistency Learning framework for the FETUS 2026 challenge on fetal heart ultrasound segmentation and diagnosis. The method combines a pretrained ultrasound foundation model (EchoCare) with a convolutional network through heterogeneous co-training and an exponential moving average teacher to better exploit unlabeled data. Experiments on the multi-center challenge dataset show that FM-DACL achieves a Dice score of 59.66 and NSD of 42.82 using heterogeneous backbones, demonstrating the feasibility of the proposed semi-supervised framework. These results suggest that FM-DACL provides a flexible approach for leveraging heterogeneous models in low-annotation fetal cardiac ultrasound analysis. The code is available on this https URL.

Foundation models promise to unify multiple clinical tasks within a single framework, but recent ultrasound studies report that unified models can underperform task-specific baselines. We hypothesize that this degradation arises not from model capacity limitations, but from task aggregation strategies that ignore interactions between task heterogeneity and available training data scale. In this work, we systematically analyze when heterogeneous ultrasound tasks can be jointly learned without performance loss, establishing practical criteria for task aggregation in unified clinical imaging models. We introduce M2DINO, a multi-organ, multi-task framework built on DINOv3 with task-conditioned Mixture-of-Experts blocks for adaptive capacity allocation. We systematically evaluate 27 ultrasound tasks spanning segmentation, classification, detection, and regression under three paradigms: task-specific, clinically-grouped, and all-task unified training. Our results show that aggregation effectiveness depends strongly on training data scale. While clinically-grouped training can improve performance in data-rich settings, it may induce substantial negative transfer in low-data settings. In contrast, all-task unified training exhibits more consistent performance across clinical groups. We further observe that task sensitivity varies by task type in our experiments: segmentation shows the largest performance drops compared with regression and classification. These findings provide practical guidance for ultrasound foundation models, emphasizing that aggregation strategies should jointly consider training data availability and task characteristics rather than relying on clinical taxonomy alone.

Electrified propulsion is expected to play an important role in the sustainable development of Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). However, the limited energy density of batteries motivates the need to minimize energy consumption during flight. This paper studies the minimum total energy problem for an all-electric aircraft in steady cruise flight. The problem is formulated as an optimal control problem in which the cruise airspeed and final cruise time are optimization variables. The battery supply voltage is modeled as an affine function of the battery charge. Pontryagin's Minimum Principle is used to derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for optimality, from which closed-form expressions for the optimal cruise airspeed and optimal final cruise time are obtained. Additional analytical conditions are derived that determine when all-electric operation is feasible, one of which is that sufficient electric charge must be available. Numerical simulations based on the BETA Technologies CX300 all-electric aircraft and a representative AAM scenario illustrate how the aircraft weight, cruising altitude, electrical system efficiency, and initial battery charge influence the optimal airspeed and the feasibility of all-electric cruise.

We study the convergence properties of a payoff-based higher-order version of replicator dynamics, a widely studied model in evolutionary dynamics and game-theoretic learning, in contractive games. Recent work has introduced a control-theoretic perspective for analyzing the convergence of learning dynamics through passivity theory, leading to a classification of learning dynamics based on the passivity notion they satisfy, such as \textdelta-passivity, equilibrium-independent passivity, and incremental passivity. We leverage this framework for the study of higher-order replicator dynamics for contractive games, which form the complement of passive learning dynamics. Standard replicator dynamics can be represented as a cascade interconnection between an integrator and the softmax mapping. Payoff-based higher-order replicator dynamics include a linear time-invariant (LTI) system in parallel with the existing integrator. First, we show that if this added system is strictly passive and asymptotically stable, then the resulting learning dynamics converge locally to the Nash equilibrium in contractive games. Second, we establish global convergence properties using incremental stability analysis for the special case of symmetric matrix contractive games.

Continuous-time primal-dual gradient dynamics (PDGD) is an ubiquitous approach for dynamically solving constrained distributed optimization problems. Yet, the distributed nature of the dynamics makes it prone to communication uncertainties, especially time delays. To mitigate this effect, we propose a delay-robust continuous-time PDGD. The dynamics is obtained by augmenting the standard PDGD with an auxiliary state coupled through a gain matrix, while preserving the optimal solution. Then, we present sufficient tuning conditions for this gain matrix in the form of linear matrix inequalities, which ensure uniform asymptotic stability in the presence of bounded, time-varying delays. The criterion is derived via the Lyapunov-Krasovskii method. A numerical example illustrates the improved delay robustness of our approach compared to the standard PDGD under large, time-varying delays.

The main contributions of this paper are twofold: First, we present an in-depth analysis of the impact of frame rate reductions on the visual quality of the video and the encoding as well as decoding energy. Second, we propose a lightweight frame rate selection method for energy- and quality-aware encoding. Concerning the first contribution, this paper performs extensive encoding and decoding measurements, followed by an investigation of the impact of temporal downsampling on the energy demand of encoding and decoding at different frame rates. Furthermore, we determine the objective visual quality of the downsampled videos. As a result of this investigation, we identify content- and quantization-setting-dependent energy-aware frame rates, i.e., the temporal downsampling factors that lead to Pareto-optimality in terms of energy and quality. We demonstrate that significant energy savings are achieved while maintaining constant visual quality. Subsequently, a subjective experiment is conducted to verify this observation regarding perceptual quality using mean opinion scores. As the second contribution, we propose an energy-aware frame rate selection method that extracts spatio-temporal features from the video sequences. Based on these features, the proposed method employs a feature-based supervised machine learning approach to predict energy-aware frame rates for a given quantization parameter and video sequence, aiming to reduce energy consumption during encoding and decoding. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method offers significant energy savings, with an average of 17.46% and 17.60% of encoding and decoding energy demand reduction, respectively, alongside 3.38% average bitrate savings at a constant quality.

Multiplex tissue imaging (MTI) enables high- dimensional, spatially resolved measurements of the tumor microenvironment (TME), but most clinical datasets are tempo- rally undersampled and longitudinally limited, restricting direct inference of underlying spatiotemporal dynamics and effective intervention timing. Agent-based models (ABMs) provide mech- anistic, stochastic simulators of TME evolution; yet their high- dimensional state space and uncertain parameterization make direct control design challenging. This work presents a reduced- order, simulation-driven framework for therapeutic strategy design using ABM-derived trajectory ensembles. Starting from a nominal ABM, we systematically perturb biologically plausible parameters to generate a set of simulated trajectories and construct a low-dimensional trajectory landscape describing TME evolution. From time series of spatial summary statistics extracted from the simulations, we learn a probabilistic Markov State Model (MSM) that captures metastable states and the transitions between them. To connect simulation dynamics with clinical observations, we map patient MTI snapshots onto the landscape and assess concordance with observed spatial phenotypes and clinical outcomes. We further show that conditioning the MSM on dominant governing parameters yields group-specific transition models to formulate a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) for treatment scheduling. The resulting framework enables simulation-grounded therapeutic policy design for partially observed biological systems without requiring longitudinal patient measurements.

We present a geometric approach to designing distributed unknown input observers (DUIOs) for linear time-invariant systems, where measurements are distributed across nodes and each node is influenced by \emph{unknown inputs} through distinct channels. The proposed distributed estimation scheme consists of a network of observers, each tasked with reconstructing the entire system state despite having access only to local input-output signals that are individually insufficient for full state observation. Unlike existing methods that impose stringent rank conditions on the input and output matrices at each node, our approach leverages the $(C,A)$-invariant (conditioned invariant) subspace at each node from a geometric perspective. This enables the design of DUIOs in both continuous- and discrete-time settings under relaxed conditions, for which we establish sufficiency and necessity. The effectiveness of our methodology is demonstrated through extensive simulations, including a practical case study on a power grid system.

In this paper, we develop a distributionally robust optimal control approach for differentially private dynamical systems, enabling a plant to securely outsource control computation to an untrusted remote server. We consider a plant that ensures differential privacy of its state trajectory by injecting calibrated noise into its output measurements. Unlike prior works, we assume that the server only has access to an ambiguity set consisting of admissible noise distributions, rather than the exact distribution. To account for this uncertainty, the server formulates a distributionally robust optimal control problem to minimize the worst-case expected cost over all admissible noise distributions. However, the formulated problem is computationally intractable due to the nonconvexity of the ambiguity set. To overcome this, we relax it into a convex Kullback--Leibler divergence ball, so that the reformulated problem admits a tractable closed-form solution.

In 1983, Brockett developed a topological necessary condition for the existence of continuous, asymptotically stabilizing control laws. Building upon recent work on necessary conditions for set stabilization, we develop Brockett-like necessary conditions for the existence of control barrier functions (CBFs). By leveraging the unique geometry of CBF safe sets, we provide simple and self-contained derivations of necessary conditions for the existence of CBFs and their safe, continuous controllers. We demonstrate the application of these conditions to instructive examples and kinematic nonholonomic systems, and discuss their relationship to Brockett's necessary condition.

Electric vehicles (EVs) in Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) systems act as distributed energy resources that support grid stability. Centralized coordination such as the extended State Space Model (eSSM) enhances scalability and estimation efficiency but may introduce new cyber-attack surfaces. This paper presents a stealthy False Data Injection Attack (FDIA) targeting eSSM-based V2G coordination. Unlike prior studies that assume attackers can disrupt physical charging or discharging processes, we consider an adversary who compromises only a subset of EVs, and limiting their influence to the manipulation of reported State of Charge (SoC) and power measurements. By doing so, the attacker can deceive the operator's perception of fleet flexibility while remaining consistent with model-based expectations, thus evading anomaly detection. Numerical simulations show that the proposed stealthy FDIA can deteriorate grid frequency stability even without direct access to control infrastructure. These findings highlight the need for enhanced detection and mitigation mechanisms tailored to aggregated V2G frameworks

Guaranteeing the safety of nonlinear systems with bounded inputs remains a key challenge in safe autonomy. Backup control barrier functions (bCBFs) provide a powerful mechanism for constructing controlled invariant sets by propagating trajectories under a pre-verified backup controller to a forward invariant backup set. While effective, the standard bCBF method utilizes the same backup controller for both set expansion and safety certification, which can restrict the expanded safe set and lead to conservative dynamic behavior. In this study, we generalize the bCBF framework by separating the set-expanding controller from the verified backup controller, thereby enabling a broader class of expansion strategies while preserving formal safety guarantees. We establish sufficient conditions for forward invariance of the resulting implicit safe set and show how the generalized construction recovers existing bCBF methods as special cases. Moreover, we extend the proposed framework to parameterized controller families, enabling online adaptation of the expansion controller while maintaining safety guarantees in the presence of input bounds.

Due to the absence of clean reference signals and spatial cues, monaural unsupervised speech dereverberation is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem. To realize it, we propose augmented reverberant-target training (ARTT), which consists of two stages. In the first stage, reverberant-target training (RTT) is proposed to first further reverberate the observed reverberant mixture signal, and then train a deep neural network (DNN) to recover the observed reverberant mixture via discriminative training. Although the target signal to fit is reverberant, we find that the resulting DNN can effectively reduce reverberation. In the second stage, an online self-distillation mechanism based on the mean-teacher algorithm is proposed to further improve dereverberation. Evaluation results demonstrate that ARTT achieves strong unsupervised dereverberation performance, significantly outperforming previous baselines.

Accurate segmentation of tissues and instruments in surgical scenes is annotation-intensive due to irregular shapes, thin structures, specularities, and frequent occlusions. While SAM models support point, box, and mask prompts, points are often too sparse and boxes too coarse to localize such challenging targets. We present SCISSR, a scribble-promptable framework for interactive surgical scene segmentation. It introduces a lightweight Scribble Encoder that converts freehand scribbles into dense prompt embeddings compatible with the mask decoder, enabling iterative refinement for a target object by drawing corrective strokes on error regions. Because all added modules (the Scribble Encoder, Spatial Gated Fusion, and LoRA adapters) interact with the backbone only through its standard embedding interfaces, the framework is not tied to a single model: we build on SAM 2 in this work, yet the same components transfer to other prompt-driven segmentation architectures such as SAM 3 without structural modification. To preserve pre-trained capabilities, we train only these lightweight additions while keeping the remaining backbone frozen. Experiments on EndoVis 2018 demonstrate strong in-domain performance, while evaluation on the out-of-distribution CholecSeg8k further confirms robustness across surgical domains. SCISSR achieves 95.41% Dice on EndoVis 2018 with five interaction rounds and 96.30% Dice on CholecSeg8k with three interaction rounds, outperforming iterative point prompting on both benchmarks.

Deep unrolled models (DUMs) have become the state of the art for accelerated MRI reconstruction, yet their robustness under domain shift remains a critical barrier to clinical adoption. In this work, we identify coil sensitivity map (CSM) estimation as the primary bottleneck limiting generalization. To address this, we propose UEPS, a novel DUM architecture featuring three key innovations: (i) an Unrolled Expanded (UE) design that eliminates CSM dependency by reconstructing each coil independently; (ii) progressive resolution, which leverages k-space-to-image mapping for efficient coarse-to-fine refinement; and (iii) sparse attention tailored to MRI's 1D undersampling nature. These physics-grounded designs enable simultaneous gains in robustness and computational efficiency. We construct a large-scale zero-shot transfer benchmark comprising 10 out-of-distribution test sets spanning diverse clinical shifts -- anatomy, view, contrast, vendor, field strength, and coil configurations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UEPS consistently and substantially outperforms existing DUM, end-to-end, diffusion, and untrained methods across all OOD tests, achieving state-of-the-art robustness with low-latency inference suitable for real-time deployment.

Future sixth-generation of wireless system is expected to provide data-rates in the order of 1 Tbps and latencies below 1 ms. Among others, one of the most promising strategies to meet these requirements is to operate at higher frequencies than millimeter wave bands: the THz bands. Nevertheless, because of the higher losses and the detriment of classical propagation mechanisms, deploying systems operating at these frequencies becomes a real challenge. Consequently, short-range scenarios are of special interest since these effects of THz bands can be managed. This work conducts an extensive campaign within corridors at frequencies within the H-band in the range from 250 GHz to 330 GHz. For the first time in literature, an ultra wideband of 80 GHz is studied simultaneously. Large scale effects are assessed by estimating and modeling path gain. The path gain exponent varies between -2.1 and -1.6, which is explained by a guiding effect also observed at millimeter wave bands. Small scale effects are also evaluated in terms of parameters such as rice $K$-factor, root mean squared delay spread and coherence bandwidth. Additionally, an analytical approximation based on the classical N-rays model is proposed obtaining an accurate representation of the wireless channel which is coherent with the empirical analysis. The full analysis reveals the suitability of these THz bands for deploying point-to-point links due to the predominance of the line-of-sight contribution respect to the reflected components.

This paper investigates a cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system that addresses the critical challenge of information leakage to potential eavesdroppers located within sensing zones. A novel access point (AP) selection strategy is proposed, which partitions the distributed APs into two functional groups: communication APs (C-APs), dedicated exclusively to data transmission, and sensing APs (S-APs), responsible for target detection and eavesdropper suppression. Closed-form expressions for the achievable communication rate, eavesdropping rate, and mainlobe-to-average-sidelobe ratio (MASR) are derived to evaluate system performance. Two complementary optimization problems are formulated using the successive convex approximation (SCA): (i) maximizing user rates under security constraints and (ii) minimizing eavesdropping rates while satisfying quality of service (QoS) requirements. The proposed joint optimization framework determines the optimal AP operational modes and power allocation across communication and sensing links. Extensive numerical results validate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate significant performance gains, revealing inherent trade-offs among communication efficiency, sensing accuracy, and security. These insights offer practical guidelines for designing secure CF-mMIMO ISAC systems.

Many applications involving multi-agent systems require fulfilling safety constraints. Control barrier functions offer a systematic framework to enforce forward invariance of safety sets. Recent work extended this paradigm to mean-field scenarios, where the number of agents is large enough to make density-space descriptions a reasonable workaround for the curse of dimensionality. However, an open gap in the recent literature concerns the development of mean-field control barrier functions for Fokker-Planck (advection-diffusion) equations. In this work, we address this gap, enabling safe mean-field control of agents with stochastic microscopic dynamics. We provide bounded stability guarantees under safety corrections and corroborate our results through numerical simulations in two representative scenarios, coverage and shepherding control of multi-agent systems.

We study a continuous-time dynamical system of nodes diffusively coupled over a hierarchical network to examine the efficiency and performance tradeoffs that organizations, teams, and command and control units face while achieving coordination and sharing information across layers. Specifically, after defining a network structure that captures real-world features of hierarchical organizations, we use linear systems theory and perturbation theory to characterize the rate of convergence to a consensus state, and how effectively information can propagate through the network, depending on the breadth of the organization and the strength of inter-layer communication. Interestingly, our analytical insights highlight a fundamental performance tradeoff. Namely, networks that favor fast coordination will have decreased ability to share information that is generated in the lower layers of the organization and is to be passed up the hierarchy. Numerical results validate and extend our theoretical results.

Sleep disturbances are tightly linked to cardiovascular risk, yet polysomnography (PSG)-the clinical reference standard-remains resource-intensive and poorly suited for multi-night, home-based, and large-scale screening. Single-lead electrocardiography (ECG), already ubiquitous in Holter and patch-based devices, enables comfortable long-term acquisition and encodes sleep-relevant physiology through autonomic modulation and cardiorespiratory coupling. Here, we present a proof-of-concept Holter-to-Sleep framework that, using single-lead ECG as the sole input, jointly supports overnight sleep phenotyping and Holter-grade cardiac phenotyping within the same recording, and further provides an explicit analytic pathway for scalable cardio-sleep association studies. The framework is developed and validated on a pooled multi-center PSG sample of 10,439 studies spanning four public cohorts, with independent external evaluation to assess cross-cohort generalizability, and additional real-world feasibility assessment using overnight patch-ECG recordings via objective-subjective consistency analysis. This integrated design enables robust extraction of clinically meaningful overnight sleep phenotypes under heterogeneous populations and acquisition conditions, and facilitates systematic linkage between ECG-derived sleep metrics and arrhythmia-related Holter phenotypes. Collectively, the Holter-to-Sleep paradigm offers a practical foundation for low-burden, home-deployable, and scalable cardio-sleep monitoring and research beyond traditional PSG-centric workflows.

A major bottleneck in Computer-Assisted Preoperative Planning (CAPP) for fracture reduction is the limited availability of annotated data. While annotated datasets are now available for evaluating bone fracture segmentation algorithms, there is a notable lack of annotated data for the evaluation of automatic fracture reduction methods. Obtaining precise annotations, which are essential for training and evaluating automatic CAPP algorithm, of the reduced bone therefore remains a critical and underexplored challenge. Existing approaches to assess reduction methods rely either on synthetic fracture simulation which often lacks realism, or on manual virtual reductions, which are complex, time-consuming, operator-dependant and error-prone. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid physical-digital framework for generating annotated fracture reduction data. Based on fracture CTs, fragments are first 3D printed, physically reduced, fixed and CT scanned to accurately recover transformation matrix applied to each fragment. To quantitatively assess reduction quality, we introduce a reproducible formulation of clinically relevant 3D fracture metrics, including 3D gap, 3D step-off, and total gap area. The framework was evaluated on 11 clinical acetabular fracture cases reduced by two independent operators. Compared to preoperative measurements, the proposed approach achieved mean improvements of 168.85 mm 2 in total gap area, 1.82 mm in 3D gap, and 0.81 mm in 3D step-off. This hybrid physical--digital framework enables the efficient generation of realistic, clinically relevant annotated fracture reduction data that can be used for the development and evaluation of automatic fracture reduction algorithms.

In this paper, we show a stochastic approach to generate a 3D model of a foliage, which is then used for deterministic ray-tracing channel modeling. This approach is verified by a measurement campaign at 60 and 80 GHz with 2 GHz bandwidth. The wireless channel is characterized by path-loss and RMS delay spread and we show the angular dependency of those parameters when the receiver is placed on a half-circle around the tree. Besides electromagnetic material properties, the 3D model is characterized by several interpretable parameters, including tree volume, leaf size, leaf density, and the tree crown shape parameter.

A stochastic modeling methodology for 3-D foliage is presented, aimed at enhancing ray-tracing simulations. The model supports adjustable stochastic geometry, density, and shape to capture variability in foliage structures. The model is validated through experimental measurements of representative vegetation. The influence of foliage density and size on path loss and root mean square delay spread is analyzed to demonstrate the applicability of the model in the 80 GHz frequency band.

Understanding the impact of vegetation and small-scale antenna movements on signal propagation is important for the design and optimization of high-frequency wireless communication systems. This paper presents an experimental study analyzing signal propagation at 60 GHz and 80 GHz in the presence of vegetation, with a focus on forward scattering and microdiversity effects. A controlled measurement campaign was conducted in an indoor environment, where the influence of a potted plant placed in the line-of-sight (LOS) path between the transmitter and receiver was investigated. The study examines the effects of antenna micro-shifts on the channel impulse response (CIR), highlighting variations in received power due to small positional changes of the antennas. The results indicate that the 80 GHz band exhibits higher sensitivity to micro-movements compared to the 60 GHz band, leading to greater fluctuations in received power.

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) critically depends on waveform design, which governs both reliable data delivery and efficient energy harvesting. Among waveform characteristics, the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) plays a pivotal role: low-PAPR signals improve power amplifier (PA) efficiency, while high-PAPR signals exploit rectifier nonlinearities to boost harvested energy. This duality makes PAPR a fundamental design challenge in SWIPT systems. To tackle this issue, we establish a unified analytical framework that characterizes the PAPR-dependent behaviors of both the PA and the rectifier, thereby revealing how waveform statistics determine end-to-end energy transfer efficiency. Building on this insight, we propose a frequency-domain resource allocation strategy for power-splitting SWIPT, where spectral segments are adaptively assigned to balance communication throughput with energy harvesting performance. Here, a key contribution is to extend SWIPT to MIMO-OFDM architectures. Despite concerns over excessive PAPR in large-scale antenna-subcarrier configurations, we demonstrate that appropriate waveform adaptation and resource optimization can transform MIMO-OFDM into an energy-efficient platform for joint data and power transfer. Finally, simulation results confirm significant improvements in PA efficiency, rectifier output, and overall energy transfer, thereby validating the practical benefits of the proposed approach.

Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAVs) empower sixth-generation (6G) Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks through mobility-driven data collection. However, conventional reward-driven reinforcement learning for AAV trajectory planning suffers from severe credit assignment issues and training instability, because sparse scalar rewards fail to capture the long-term and nonlinear effects of sequential movements. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Learn for Variation (L4V), a gradient-informed trajectory learning framework that replaces high-variance scalar reward signals with dense and analytically grounded policy gradients. Particularly, the coupled evolution of AAV kinematics, distance-dependent channel gains, and per-user data-collection progress is first unrolled into an end-to-end differentiable computational graph. Backpropagation through time then serves as a discrete adjoint solver, which propagates exact sensitivities from the cumulative mission objective to every control action and policy parameter. These structured gradients are used to train a deterministic neural policy with temporal smoothness regularization and gradient clipping. Extensive simulations demonstrate that L4V consistently outperforms representative baselines, including a genetic algorithm, DQN, A2C, and DDPG, in mission completion time, average transmission rate, and training cost

Radio maps (RMs) provide spatially continuous propagation characterizations essential for 6G network planning, but high-fidelity RM construction remains challenging. Rigorous electromagnetic solvers incur prohibitive computational latency, while data-driven models demand massive labeled datasets and generalize poorly from simplified simulations to complex multipath environments. This paper proposes RadioDiff-FS, a few-shot diffusion framework that adapts a pre-trained main-path generator to multipath-rich target domains with only a small number of high-fidelity samples. The adaptation is grounded in a theoretical decomposition of the multipath RM into a dominant main-path component and a directionally sparse residual. This decomposition shows that the cross-domain shift corresponds to a bounded and geometrically structured feature translation rather than an arbitrary distribution change. A Direction-Consistency Loss (DCL) is then introduced to constrain diffusion score updates along physically plausible propagation directions, suppressing phase-inconsistent artifacts that arise in the low-data regime. Experiments show that RadioDiff-FS reduces NMSE by 59.5% on static RMs and by 74.0% on dynamic RMs relative to the vanilla diffusion baseline, achieving an SSIM of 0.9752 and a PSNR of 36.37 dB under severely limited supervision.

Electrohysterography (EHG) enables non-invasive monitoring of uterine contractions but can be contaminated by electrocardiogram (ECG) artifacts. This work presents an ECG removal method using algebraic differentiators, a control-theoretic tool for model-free derivative estimation, that preserves signal shape outside the detected cardiac pulse locations. The differentiator parameters are designed to simultaneously suppress slow physiological artifacts and powerline interference while maximizing output signal-to-noise ratio. Cross-channel clustering distinguishes cardiac pulses from localized artifacts, enabling accurate pulse subtraction without auxiliary ECG references. Implemented as a causal FIR filter, the method is validated on multichannel EHG recordings from female and male subjects and compared to the template subtraction method.

Radar target detection in the presence of a mixture of non-Gaussian clutter and white thermal noise is a challenging problem. This paper proposes a Rectified Flow Matching-based method for radar detection, termed D-RFM. Unlike existing detectors, D-RFM learns a mapping from a standard Gaussian distribution to radar observations by capturing the underlying velocity field. Detection is then performed by inverse mapping test samples into the latent Gaussian space using the learned velocity field, with targets identified as deviations from the learned distribution. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method under both Gaussian and non-Gaussian clutter plus additive white Gaussian noise, highlighting its accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency.

Analog multiplexing for sigma delta modulated Digital to Analog Converters has been recently proposed as a means of achieving robustness. This preprint analyses said scheme via simulations. The main limitation introduced by the proposed architecture comes from mismatch in the DACs gain, which can drastically impact performances. A new technique of dynamic elements matching is proposed here to overcome this problem.

This paper is motivated by controllers developed for autonomous vehicles which occasionally result into conditions where safety is no longer guaranteed. We develop an exact-time safety recovery framework for any control-affine nonlinear system when its state is outside a safe region using time-varying Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) with optimal barrier tracking. Unlike conventional formulations that provide only conservative upper bounds on recovery time convergence, the proposed approach guarantees recovery to the safe set at a prescribed time. The key mechanism is an active barrier tracking condition that forces the barrier function to follow exactly a designer-specified recovery trajectory. This transforms safety recovery into a trajectory design problem. The recovery trajectory is parameterized and optimized to achieve optimal performance while preserving feasibility under input constraints, avoiding the aggressive corrective actions typically induced by conventional finite-time formulations. The safety recovery framework is applied to the roundabout traffic coordination problem for Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs), where any initially violated safe merging constraint is replaced by an exact-time recovery barrier constraint to ensure safety guarantee restoration before CAV conflict points are reached. Simulation results demonstrate improved feasibility and performance.

The growing use of inverter-based resources in modern power systems has made grid-following inverters a central topic in power-system modeling, control, and simulation. Despite their widespread deployment, introductory material that explains grid-following inverter operation from first principles and connects control design to time-domain simulation remains limited. To address this need, this tutorial presents a circuit-theoretic introduction to the modeling and simulation of a grid- following inverter connected to an electrical power grid. We describe the inverter synchronization with the grid (PLL), power control, and current control structure and show how these elements can be represented within an electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation framework using companion model-based formulations similar to those used in circuit simulators such as SPICE and Cadence. In this tutorial, we use the grid-following inverter as the primary example to illustrate how its governing equations, control loops, and network interface can be formulated and simulated from first principles. By the end of the document, readers should gain a clear introductory understanding of how to model and simulate a grid-following inverter in an EMT platform.

This study demonstrates, for the first time, how a network of cellular base stations (BSs) - the infrastructure of mobile radio networks - can be used as a distributed opportunistic radar for rainfall remote sensing. By adapting signal-processing techniques traditionally employed in Doppler weather radar systems, we demonstrate that BS signals can be used to retrieve typical weather radar products, including reflectivity factor, mean Doppler velocity, and spectral width. Due to the high spatial density of BS infrastructure in urban environments, combined with intrinsic technical features such as electronically steerable antenna arrays and wide receiver bandwidths, the proposed approach achieves unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions, on the order of a few meters and several tens of seconds, respectively. Despite limitations related to low transmitted power, limited antenna gain, and other system constraints, a major challenge arises from ground clutter contamination, which is exacerbated by the nearly horizontal orientation of BS antenna beams. This work provides a thorough assessment of clutter impact and demonstrates that, through appropriate processing, the resulting clutter-filtered radar moments reach a satisfactory level of quality when compared with raw observations and with measurements from independent BSs with overlapped field-of-views. The findings highlight a transformative opportunity for urban hydrometeorology: leveraging existing telecommunications infrastructure to obtain rainfall information with a level of spatial granularity and temporal immediacy like never before.

Dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) are an emerging hybrid-MIMO technology distinguished by an ultrathin form factor, low cost, and low power consumption. In real-world DMA prototypes, mutual coupling (MC) between meta-elements is generally non-negligible; some architectures even deliberately exploit strong MC to enhance wave-domain flexibility. In this paper, we address channel estimation (CE) for DMAs with known MC by formulating it as a tensor-decomposition problem. We develop a generalized block Tucker alternating least squares (BTALS) algorithm, together with specialized variants for cases with known direct and/or feed channel. We also develop a reciprocity-aware bilinear factorization method for the case with known direct channel. We experimentally validate our algorithms using an 18 GHz DMA prototype whose 7 feeds and 96 meta-elements are strongly coupled via a chaotic cavity. Our general BTALS algorithm reaches an accuracy of 43.1 dB, only 0.3 dB below the upper bound imposed by experimental noise. All proposed algorithms generally outperform the prior-art reference scheme thanks to the superior noise rejection enabled by the tensor-based framework. We further study the minimum number of required measurements as a function of the number of feeds and demonstrate the importance of MC awareness by comparison with an MC-unaware benchmark. Finally, we apply BTALS to a second setup enabling the prediction of the DMA's full dual-polarization 3D radiation diagram. We also measure the latter for DMA configurations optimized for channel-gain enhancement based on the estimated channels. Altogether, our work establishes the practical relevance of MC-aware tensor methods; beyond DMAs, it applies to all wireless systems with wave-domain programmability enabled by tunable lumped elements.

Camera pipelines receive raw Bayer-format frames that need to be denoised, demosaiced, and often super-resolved. Multiple frames are captured to utilize natural hand tremors and enhance resolution. Multi-frame super-resolution is therefore a fundamental problem in camera pipelines. Existing adversarial methods are constrained by the quality of ground truth. We propose GenMFSR, the first Generative Multi-Frame Raw-to-RGB Super Resolution pipeline, that incorporates image priors from foundation models to obtain sub-pixel information for camera ISP applications. GenMFSR can align multiple raw frames, unlike existing single-frame super-resolution methods, and we propose a loss term that restricts generation to high-frequency regions in the raw domain, thus preventing low-frequency artifacts.

Autonomous driving (AD) requires safe and reliable decision-making among interacting agents, e.g., vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) modeled by Markov games (MGs) provides a suitable framework to characterize such agents' interactions during decision-making. Nash equilibria (NEs) are often the desired solution in an MG. However, it is typically challenging to compute an NE in general-sum games, unless the game is a Markov potential game (MPG), which ensures the NE attainability under a few learning algorithms such as gradient play. However, it has been an open question how to construct an MPG and whether these construction rules are suitable for AD applications. In this paper, we provide sufficient conditions under which an MG is an MPG and show that these conditions can accommodate general driving objectives for autonomous vehicles (AVs) using highway forced merge scenarios as illustrative examples. A parameter-sharing neural network (NN) structure is designed to enable decentralized policy execution. The trained driving policy from MPGs is evaluated in both simulated and naturalistic traffic datasets. Comparative studies with single-agent RL and with human drivers whose behaviors are recorded in the traffic datasets are reported, respectively.

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as knowledge backbones of Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), yet how much auditory knowledge they encode through text-only pre-training and how this affects downstream performance remains unclear. We study this gap by comparing different LLMs under two text-only and one audio-grounded setting: (1) direct probing on AKB-2000, a curated benchmark testing the breadth and depth of auditory knowledge; (2) cascade evaluation, where LLMs reason over text descriptions from an audio captioner; and (3) audio-grounded evaluation, where each LLM is fine-tuned into a Large Audio Language Model (LALM) with an audio encoder. Our findings reveal that auditory knowledge varies substantially across families, and text-only results are strongly correlated with audio performance. Our work provides empirical grounding for a comprehensive understanding of LLMs in audio research.

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to enhance connectivity, extend network coverage, and support advanced communication services in sixth-generation (6G) cellular networks, particularly in public and civil domains. Although multi-UAV systems enhance connectivity for IoT networks more than single-UAV systems, energy-efficient communication systems and the integration of energy harvesting (EH) are crucial for their widespread adoption and effectiveness. In this regard, this paper proposes a hierarchical ad hoc UAV network with non-linear EH and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to enhance both energy and cost efficiency. The proposed system consists of two UAV layers: a cluster head UAV (CHU), which acts as the source, and cluster member UAVs (CMUs), which serve as relays and are capable of harvesting energy from a terrestrial power beacon. For the considered IoT network architecture, the outage probability expressions of ground Internet of things (IoT) devices, each CMU, and the overall outage probability of the proposed system are derived over Nakagami-m fading channels with practical constraints such as hardware impairments and non-linear EH. We compare the proposed system against a non EH system, and our findings indicate that the proposed system outperforms the benchmark in terms of outage probability.

Solid-state storage architectures based on NAND or emerging memory devices (SSD), are fundamentally architected and optimized for both reliability and performance. Achieving these simultaneous goals requires co-design of memory components with firmware-architected Error Management (EM) algorithms for density- and performance-scaled memory technologies. We describe a Machine Learning (ML) for systems methodology and modeling for co-designing the EM subsystem together with the natural variance inherent to scaled silicon process of memory components underlying SSD technology. The modeling analyzes NAND memory components and EM algorithms interacting with comprehensive suite of synthetic (stress-focused and JEDEC) and emulation (YCSB and similar) workloads across Flash Translation abstraction layers, by leveraging a statistically interpretable and intuitively explainable ML algorithm. The generalizable co-design framework evaluates several thousand datacenter SSDs spanning multiple generations of memory and storage technology. Consequently, the modeling framework enables continuous, holistic, data-driven design towards generational architectural advancements. We additionally demonstrate that the framework enables Representation Learning of the EM-workload domain for enhancement of the architectural design-space across broad spectrum of workloads.

We propose to model parallel streams of data, such as overlapped speech, using shuffles. Specifically, this paper shows how the shuffle product and partial order finite-state automata (FSAs) can be used for alignment and speaker-attributed transcription of overlapped speech. We train using the total score on these FSAs as a loss function, marginalizing over all possible serializations of overlapping sequences at subword, word, and phrase levels. To reduce graph size, we impose temporal constraints by constructing partial order FSAs. We address speaker attribution by modeling (token, speaker) tuples directly. Viterbi alignment through the shuffle product FSA directly enables one-pass alignment. We evaluate performance on synthetic LibriSpeech overlaps. To our knowledge, this is the first algorithm that enables single-pass alignment of multi-talker recordings. All algorithms are implemented using k2 / Icefall.

To explore the feasibility of avoiding the confident error (or hallucination) of generation models (GMs), we formalise the system of GMs as a class of stochastic dynamical systems through the lens of control theory. Numerous factors can be attributed to the hallucination of the learning process of GMs, utilising knowledge of control theory allows us to analyse their system functions and system responses. Due to the high complexity of GMs when using various optimization methods, we cannot figure out their solution of Laplace transform, but from a macroscopic perspective, simulating the source response provides a virtual way to address the hallucination of GMs. We also find that the training progress is consistent with the corresponding system response, which offers us a useful way to develop a better optimization component. Finally, the hallucination problem of GMs is fundamentally optimized by using Laplace transform analysis.

Swarm and constellation reconfiguration can be viewed as motion of an unordered point configuration in an ambient space. Here, we provide persistence-stable, symmetry-invariant geometric representations for comparing and monitoring multi-agent configuration data. We introduce a quotient formation space $\mathcal{S}_n(M,G)=M^n/(G\times S_n)$ and a formation matching metric $d_{M,G}$ obtained by optimizing a worst-case assignment error over ambient symmetries $g\in G$ and relabelings $\sigma\in S_n$. This metric is a structured, physically interpretable relaxation of Gromov--Hausdorff distance: the induced inter-agent metric spaces satisfy $d_{\mathrm{GH}}(X_x,X_y)\le d_{M,G}([x],[y])$. Composing this bound with stability of Vietoris--Rips persistence yields $d_B(\Phi_k([x]),\Phi_k([y]))\le d_{M,G}([x],[y])$, providing persistence-stable signatures for reconfiguration monitoring. We analyze the metric geometry of $(\mathcal{S}_n(M,G),d_{M,G})$: under compactness/completeness assumptions on $M$ and compact $G$ it is compact/complete and the metric induces the quotient topology; if $M$ is geodesic then the quotient is geodesic and exhibits stratified singularities along collision and symmetry strata, relating it to classical configuration spaces. We study expressivity of the signatures, identifying symmetry-mismatch and persistence-compression mechanisms for non-injectivity. Finally, in a phase-circle model we prove a conditional inverse theorem: under semicircle support and a gap-labeling margin, the $H_0$ signature is locally bi-Lipschitz to $d_{M,G}$ up to an explicit factor, yielding two-sided control. Examples on $\mathbb{S}^2$ and $\mathbb{T}^m$ illustrate satellite-constellation and formation settings.

Recent Audio Multimodal Large Language Models (Audio MLLMs) demonstrate impressive performance on speech benchmarks, yet it remains unclear whether these models genuinely process acoustic signals or rely on text-based semantic inference. To systematically study this question, we introduce DEAF (Diagnostic Evaluation of Acoustic Faithfulness), a benchmark of over 2,700 conflict stimuli spanning three acoustic dimensions: emotional prosody, background sounds, and speaker identity. Then, we design a controlled multi-level evaluation framework that progressively increases textual influence, ranging from semantic conflicts in the content to misleading prompts and their combination, allowing us to disentangle content-driven bias from prompt-induced sycophancy. We further introduce diagnostic metrics to quantify model reliance on textual cues over acoustic signals. Our evaluation of seven Audio MLLMs reveals a consistent pattern of text dominance: models are sensitive to acoustic variations, yet predictions are predominantly driven by textual inputs, revealing a gap between high performance on standard speech benchmarks and genuine acoustic understanding.

Self-interested behavior in sharing economies often leads to inefficient aggregate outcomes compared to a centrally coordinated allocation, ultimately harming users. Yet, centralized coordination removes individual decision power. This issue can be addressed by designing rules that align individual preferences with system-level objectives. Unfortunately, rules based on conventional monetary mechanisms introduce unfairness by discriminating among users based on their wealth. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a token-based mechanism for congestion games that achieves efficient and fair dynamic resource allocation. Specifically, we model the token economy as a continuous-time dynamic game with finitely many boundedly rational agents, explicitly capturing their evolutionary policy-revision dynamics. We derive a mean-field approximation of the finite-population game and establish strong approximation guarantees between the mean-field and the finite-population games. This approximation enables the design of integer tolls in closed form that provably steer the aggregate dynamics toward an optimal efficient and fair allocation from any initial condition.

Skele-Code is a natural-language and graph-based interface for building workflows with AI agents, designed especially for less or non-technical users. It supports incremental, interactive notebook-style development, and each step is converted to code with a required set of functions and behavior to enable incremental building of workflows. Agents are invoked only for code generation and error recovery, not orchestration or task execution. This agent-supported, but code-first approach to workflows, along with the context-engineering used in Skele-Code, can help reduce token costs compared to the multi-agent system approach to executing workflows. Skele-Code produces modular, easily extensible, and shareable workflows. The generated workflows can also be used as skills by agents, or as steps in other workflows.

Fault-tolerant quantum computation demands extremely low logical error rates, yet superconducting qubit arrays are subject to radiation-induced correlated noise arising from cosmic-ray muon-generated quasiparticles. The quasiparticle density is unknown and time-varying, resulting in a mismatch between the true noise statistics and the priors assumed by standard decoders, and consequently, degraded logical performance. We formalize joint noise sensing and decoding using syndrome measurements by modeling the QP density as a latent variable, which governs correlation in physical errors and syndrome measurements. Starting from a variational expectation--maximization approach, we derive an iterative algorithm that alternates between QP density estimation and syndrome-based decoding under the updated noise model. Simulations of surface-code and bivariate bicycle quantum memory under radiation-induced correlated noise demonstrate a measurable reduction in logical error probability relative to baseline decoding with a uniform prior. Beyond improved decoding performance, the inferred QP density provides diagnostic information relevant to device characterization, shielding, and chip design. These results indicate that integrating physical noise estimation into decoding can mitigate correlated noise effects and relax effective error-rate requirements for fault-tolerant quantum computation.

This is an extended journal version of the conference paper published in ISIT 2025; submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications (TCOM). Integrating coded caching (CC) into multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications significantly enhances the achievable degrees of freedom (DoF). This paper investigates a practical cache-aided asymmetric MIMO configuration with cache ratio $\gamma$, where a server with $L$ transmit antennas communicates with $K$ users. The users are partitioned into $J$ groups, and each user in group $j$ has $G_j$ receive antennas. We propose four content-aware MIMO-CC strategies: \emph{min-$G$} enforces symmetry using the smallest antenna count among users; \emph{Grouping} maximizes intra-subset spatial multiplexing gain at the expense of some global caching gain; \emph{Super-grouping} aggregates users into optimized \emph{min-$G$}-based super-sets with identical effective receive multiplexing gains before applying \emph{Grouping} across them; and \emph{Phantom} redistributes spatial resources assuming ``phantom'' antennas at the users to bridge the performance gains of \emph{min-$G$} and \emph{Grouping}. We develop these asymmetric strategies under three reference symmetric CC placement-delivery policies with guaranteed linear decodability: a DoF-optimal policy achieving the optimal single-shot DoF, and two closed-form policies, namely combinatorial and linear cyclic low-complexity constructions, with the cyclic policy attaining DoF performance close to the others in many operating regimes. Analytical and numerical results demonstrate significant DoF improvements across various system configurations, and that policy-strategy combinations offer flexible trade-offs between DoF and subpacketization complexity.

Mobile robotic manipulation--the ability of robots to navigate spaces and interact with objects--is a core capability of physical AI. Foundation models have led to breakthroughs in their performance, but at a significant computational cost. We present the first measurement study of mobile robotic manipulation workloads across onboard, edge, and cloud GPU platforms. We find that the full workload stack is infeasible to run on smaller onboard GPUs, while larger onboard GPUs drain robot batteries several hours faster. Offloading alleviates these constraints but introduces its own challenges, as additional network latency degrades task accuracy, and the bandwidth requirement makes naive cloud offloading impractical. Finally, we quantify opportunities and pitfalls of sharing compute across robot fleets. We believe our measurement study will be crucial to designing inference systems for mobile robots.

The integration of non-terrestrial networks (NTN) into 5G new radio (NR) enables a new class of positioning capabilities based on cellular signals transmitted by Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. In this paper, we investigate joint delay-and-carrier-phase positioning for LEO-based NR-NTN systems and provide a convergence-centric comparison with Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). We show that the rapid orbital motion of LEO satellites induces strong temporal and geometric diversity across observation epochs, thereby improving the conditioning of multi-epoch carrier-phase models and enabling significantly faster integer-ambiguity convergence. To enable robust carrier-phase tracking under intermittent positioning reference signal (PRS) transmissions, we propose a dual-waveform design that combines wideband PRS for delay estimation with a continuous narrowband carrier for phase tracking. Using a realistic simulation framework incorporating LEO orbit dynamics, we demonstrate that LEO-based joint delay-and-carrier-phase positioning achieves cm-level accuracy with convergence times on the order of a few seconds, whereas GNSS remains limited to meter-level accuracy over comparable short observation windows. These results establish LEO-based cellular positioning as a strong complement and potential alternative to GNSS for high-accuracy positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services in future wireless networks.

A fundamental problem in noncooperative dynamic game theory is the computation of Nash equilibria under different information structures, which specify the information available to each agent during decision-making. Prior work has extensively studied equilibrium solutions for two canonical information structures: feedback, where agents observe the current state at each time, and open-loop, where agents only observe the initial state. However, these paradigms are often too restrictive to capture realistic settings exhibiting interleaved information structures, in which each agent observes only a subset of other agents at every timestep. To date, there is no systematic framework for modeling and solving dynamic games under arbitrary interleaved information structures. To this end, we make two main contributions. First, we introduce a method to model deterministic dynamic games with arbitrary interleaved information structures as Mathematical Program Networks (MPNs), where the network structure encodes the informational dependencies between agents. Second, for linear-quadratic (LQ) dynamic games, we leverage the MPN formulation to develop a systematic procedure for deriving Riccati-like equations that characterize Nash equilibria. Finally, we illustrate our approach through an example involving three agents exhibiting a cyclic information structure.

Fundamental limits on the performance of feedback controllers are essential for benchmarking algorithms, guiding sensor selection, and certifying task feasibility -- yet few general-purpose tools exist for computing them. Existing information-theoretic approaches overestimate the information a sensor must provide by evaluating it against the uncontrolled system, producing bounds that degrade precisely when feedback is most valuable. We derive a lower bound on the minimum expected cost of any causal feedback controller under partial observations by applying the Gibbs variational principle to the joint path measure over states and observations. The bound applies to nonlinear, nonholonomic, and hybrid dynamics with unbounded costs and admits a self-consistent refinement: any good controller concentrates the state, which limits the information the sensor can extract, which tightens the bound. The resulting fixed-point equation has a unique solution computable by bisection, and we provide conditions under which the free energy minimization is provably convex, yielding a certifiably correct numerical bound. On a nonlinear Dubins car tracking problem, the self-consistent bound captures most of the optimal cost across sensor noise levels, while the open-loop variant is vacuous at low noise.

This paper transfers three statistical methods from particle physics to multirotor propeller fault detection: the likelihood ratio test (LRT) for binary detection, the CLs modified frequentist method for false alarm rate control, and sequential neural posterior estimation (SNPE) for quantitative fault characterization. Operating on spectral features tied to rotor harmonic physics, the system returns three outputs: binary detection, controlled false alarm rates, and calibrated posteriors over fault severity and motor location. On UAV-FD, a hexarotor dataset of 18 real flights with 5% and 10% blade damage, leave-one-flight-out cross-validation gives AUC 0.862 +/- 0.007 (95% CI: 0.849--0.876), outperforming CUSUM (0.708 +/- 0.010), autoencoder (0.753 +/- 0.009), and LSTM autoencoder (0.551). At 5% false alarm rate the system detects 93% of significant and 81% of subtle blade damage. On PADRE, a quadrotor platform, AUC reaches 0.986 after refitting only the generative models. SNPE gives a full posterior over fault severity (90% credible interval coverage 92--100%, MAE 0.012), so the output includes uncertainty rather than just a point estimate or fault flag. Per-flight sequential detection achieves 100% fault detection with 94% overall accuracy.

This paper proposes a robust damage identification method using noisy frequency response functions (FRFs) and topology optimization. We formulate the damage identification problem as an inverse problem of generating the damage topology of the structure from measured dynamic responses of the structure to given external dynamic loading. The method is based on the minimization of the objective function representing errors between measured FRFs of the structure obtained by experimental modal analysis, and those obtained by harmonic response analysis using finite element analysis. In the minimization process, material distribution, or the topology of the structure is varied and the optimal damage topology is identified as regions with no material assigned as a result of the minimization using the solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP). In order to overcome the problems caused by the ill-posedness of the inverse problem, it is proposed that the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) regularization, or the penalization to the L1 norm of the design variable be applied to the original objective function. By applying Lasso regularization, the method is expected not only to eliminate spurious damaged regions but also to minimize the effect of measurement noises. This paper first presents the mathematical background and its numerical implementation of the proposed methodology. The method is then applied to the identification of a damage of cantilevered plates. The FRFs were experimentally obtained and the proposed method is applied. It is shown that the method successfully identifies the damage.

With the advent of system-in-package (SiP) chiplet-based design and heterogeneous 2.5D/3D integration, thermal-induced warpage has become a critical reliability concern. While conventional numerical approaches can deliver highly accurate results, they often incur prohib- itively high computational costs, limiting their scalability for complex chiplet-package systems. In this paper, we present WarPGNN, an ef- ficient and accurate parametric thermal warpage analysis framework powered by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). By operating directly on graphs constructed from the floorplans, WarPGNN enables fast warpage-aware floorplan exploration and exhibits strong transfer- ability across diverse package configurations. Our method first en- codes multi-die floorplans into reduced Transitive Closure Graphs (rTCGs), then a Graph Convolution Network (GCN)-based encoder extracts hierarchical structural features, followed by a U-Net inspired decoder that reconstructs warpage maps from graph feature embed- dings. Furthermore, to address the long-tailed pattern of warpage data distribution, we developed a physics-informed loss and revised a message-passing encoder based on Graph Isomorphic Network (GIN) that further enhance learning performance for extreme cases and expressiveness of graph embeddings. Numerical results show that WarPGNN achieves more than 205.91x speedup compared with the 2-D efficient FEM-based method and over 119766.64x acceleration with 3-D FEM method COMSOL, respectively, while maintaining comparable accuracy at only 1.26% full-scale normalized RMSE and 2.21% warpage value error. Compared with recent DeepONet-based model, our method achieved comparable prediction accuracy and in- ference speedup with 3.4x lower training time. In addition, WarPGNN demonstrates remarkable transferability on unseen datasets with up to 3.69% normalized RMSE and similar runtime.

We introduce DiscoPhon, a multilingual benchmark for evaluating unsupervised phoneme discovery from discrete speech units. DiscoPhon covers 6 dev and 6 test languages, chosen to span a wide range of phonemic contrasts. Given only 10 hours of speech in a previously unseen language, systems must produce discrete units that are mapped to a predefined phoneme inventory, through either a many-to-one or a one-to-one assignment. The resulting sequences are evaluated for unit quality, recognition and segmentation. We provide four pretrained multilingual HuBERT and SpidR baselines, and show that phonemic information is available enough in current models for derived units to correlate well with phonemes, though with variations across languages.

We propose a physics-grounded mechanism design for dynamic spectrum sharing that bridges the gap between radiometric retrieval constraints and economic incentives. We formulate the active and passive users coexistence problem as a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auctions mechanism, where the radiometer dynamically procures ``quiet'' time-frequency tiles from active users based on the marginal reduction in retrieval error variance. This approach ensures allocative efficiency and dominant-strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC). To overcome the computational intractability of exact VCG on large grids, we derive an approximation algorithm by using the monotone submodularity induced by the radiometer equation. AMSR-2-based simulations show that the approach avoids high-cost tiles by aggregating low-cost spectrum across time and frequency. In an interference-trap case study, the proposed framework reduces procurement costs by about 60% over a fixed-band baseline while satisfying accuracy targets.

Energy consumption is a significant concern for mobile network operators, and to enable further network energy improvements it is also an important target when developing the emerging 6G standard. In this paper we show that, despite the existence of many energy-saving features in 5G new radio (NR) networks, activating them in isolation yields only suboptimal savings and often compromises other network key performance indicators (KPIs) such as coverage or latency. We first introduce a compact taxonomy that distinguishes hardware capabilities from higher-layer features. Features fall into two classes: (i) signaling and scheduling mechanisms that create idle windows, and (ii) features that utilize those windows to save energy. We then present a feature orchestrator as a logical node to coordinate between features to maximize the gain. Using a 3GPP-aligned simulator with product-realistic parameters, we show that coordinating lean NR, scheduling, and advanced sleep modes significantly reduces gNodeB (gNB) energy consumption with negligible throughput loss, compared to the uncoordinated scenario. We conclude by outlining open issues in observability, system dynamics, coordination, and intelligent automation for energy performance management.

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into wireless communication optimization is a promising yet challenging direction. Existing approaches either use LLMs as black-box solvers or code generators, tightly coupling them with numerical computation. However, LLMs lack the precision required for physical-layer optimization, and the scarcity of wireless training data makes domain-specific fine-tuning impractical. We propose BeamAgent, an LLM-aided MIMO beamforming framework that explicitly decouples semantic intent parsing from numerical optimization. The LLM serves solely as a semantic translator that converts natural language descriptions into structured spatial constraints. A dedicated gradient-based optimizer then jointly solves the discrete base station site selection and continuous precoding design through an alternating optimization algorithm. A scene-aware prompt enables grounded spatial reasoning without fine-tuning, and a multi-round interaction mechanism with dual-layer intent classification ensures robust constraint verification. A penalty-based loss function enforces dark-zone power constraints while releasing optimization degrees of freedom for bright-zone gain maximization. Experiments on a ray-tracing-based urban MIMO scenario show that BeamAgent achieves a bright-zone power of 84.0\,dB, outperforming exhaustive zero-forcing by 7.1 dB under the same dark-zone constraint. The end-to-end system reaches within 3.3 dB of the expert upper bound, with the full optimization completing in under 2 s on a laptop.

Air-dispersed sensor networks deployed from aerial robotic systems (e.g., UAVs) provide a low-cost approach to wide-area environmental monitoring. However, existing methods often rely on active actuators for mid-air shape or trajectory control, increasing both power consumption and system cost. Here, we introduce a passive elastic-folding hinge mechanism that transforms sensors from a flat, stackable form into a three-dimensional structure upon release. Hinges are fabricated by laminating commercial sheet materials with rigid printed circuit boards (PCBs) and programming fold angles through a single oven-heating step, enabling scalable production without specialized equipment. Our geometric model links laminate geometry, hinge mechanics, and resulting fold angle, providing a predictive design methodology for target configurations. Laboratory tests confirmed fold angles between 10 degrees and 100 degrees, with a standard deviation of 4 degrees and high repeatability. Field trials further demonstrated reliable data collection and LoRa transmission during dispersion, while the Horizontal Wind Model (HWM)-based trajectory simulations indicated strong potential for wide-area sensing exceeding 10 km.

This paper presents a safety-guaranteed, runtime-efficient imitation learning framework for spacecraft close proximity control. We leverage Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for safety certificates and Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) for stability as unified design principles across data generation, training, and deployment. First, a nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) expert enforces CBF constraints to provide safe reference trajectories. Second, we train a neural policy with a novel CBF-CLF-informed loss and DAgger-like rollouts with curriculum weighting, promoting data-efficiency and reducing future safety filter interventions. Third, at deployment a lightweight one-step CBF-CLF quadratic program minimally adjusts the learned control input to satisfy hard safety constraints while encouraging stability. We validate the approach for ESA-compliant close proximity operations, including fly-around with a spherical keep-out zone and final approach inside a conical approach corridor, using the Basilisk high-fidelity simulator with nonlinear dynamics and perturbations. Numerical experiments indicate stable convergence to decision points and strict adherence to safety under the filter, with task performance comparable to the NMPC expert while significantly reducing online computation. A runtime analysis demonstrates real-time feasibility on a commercial off-the-shelf processor, supporting onboard deployment for safety-critical on-orbit servicing.

This work introduces two lightweight model predictive control (MPC) approaches for attitude tracking with reaction wheels during spacecraft rendezvous synchronization. Both approaches are based on a novel attitude deviation formulation, which enables the use of inherently linear constraints on angular velocity. We develop a single-loop and a dual-loop MPC; the latter embeds a stabilizing feedback controller within the inner loop, yielding a linear time-invariant system. Both controllers are implemented with CasADi - including automatic code generation - evaluated across various solvers, and validated within the Basilisk astrodynamics simulation framework. The experimental results demonstrate improved tracking accuracy alongside reductions in computational effort and memory consumption. Finally, embedded delivery to an ARM Cortex-M7 - representative of commercial off-the-shelf devices used in New Space platforms - confirms the real-time feasibility of these approaches and highlights their suitability for onboard attitude control in resource-constrained spacecraft rendezvous missions.

This paper addresses the fundamental question of determining the minimum number of distinct control laws required for global controllability of nonlinear systems that exhibit singularities in their feedback linearising controllers. We introduce and rigorously prove the (k+1)-Controller Lemma, which establishes that for an nth order single-input single-output nonlinear system with a singularity manifold parameterised by k algebraically independent conditions, exactly k+1 distinct control laws are necessary and sufficient for complete state-space coverage. The sufficiency proof is constructive, employing the approximate linearisation methodology together with transversality arguments from differential topology. The necessity proof proceeds by contradiction, using the Implicit Function Theorem, a dimension-counting argument and structural constraints inherent to the approximate linearisation framework. The result is validated through exhaustive analysis of the ball-and-beam system, a fourth-order mechanical system that exhibits a two-parameter singularity at the third output derivative.

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across distributed devices without sharing raw data, but applying FL to multi-modal settings introduces significant challenges. Clients typically possess heterogeneous modalities and model architectures, making it difficult to align feature spaces efficiently while preserving privacy and minimizing communication costs. To address this, we introduce CoMFed, a Communication-Efficient Multi-Modal Federated Learning framework that uses learnable projection matrices to generate compressed latent representations. A latent-space regularizer aligns these representations across clients, improving cross-modal consistency and robustness to outliers. Experiments on human activity recognition benchmarks show that CoMFed achieves competitive accuracy with minimal overhead.

Generating audio that is acoustically consistent with a scene is essential for immersive virtual environments. Recent neural acoustic field methods enable spatially continuous sound rendering but remain scene-specific, requiring dense audio measurements and costly training for each environment. Few-shot approaches improve scalability across rooms but still rely on multiple recordings and, being deterministic, fail to capture the inherent uncertainty of scene acoustics under sparse context. We introduce flow-matching acoustic generation (FLAC), a probabilistic method for few-shot acoustic synthesis that models the distribution of plausible room impulse responses (RIRs) given minimal scene context. FLAC leverages a diffusion transformer trained with a flow-matching objective to generate RIRs at arbitrary positions in novel scenes, conditioned on spatial, geometric, and acoustic cues. FLAC outperforms state-of-the-art eight-shot baselines with one-shot on both the AcousticRooms and Hearing Anything Anywhere datasets. To complement standard perceptual metrics, we further introduce AGREE, a joint acoustic-geometry embedding, enabling geometry-consistent evaluation of generated RIRs through retrieval and distributional metrics. This work is the first to apply generative flow matching to explicit RIR synthesis, establishing a new direction for robust and data-efficient acoustic synthesis.

There are two major categories of embodied navigation: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN), where agents navigate by following natural language instructions; and Object-Goal Navigation (OGN), where agents navigate to a specified target object. However, existing work primarily evaluates model performance under nominal conditions, overlooking the potential corruptions that arise in real-world settings. To address this gap, we present NavTrust, a unified benchmark that systematically corrupts input modalities, including RGB, depth, and instructions, in realistic scenarios and evaluates their impact on navigation performance. To our best knowledge, NavTrust is the first benchmark that exposes embodied navigation agents to diverse RGB-Depth corruptions and instruction variations in a unified framework. Our extensive evaluation of seven state-of-the-art approaches reveals substantial performance degradation under realistic corruptions, which highlights critical robustness gaps and provides a roadmap toward more trustworthy embodied navigation systems. Furthermore, we systematically evaluate four distinct mitigation strategies to enhance robustness against RGB-Depth and instructions corruptions. Our base models include Uni-NaVid and ETPNav. We deployed them on a real mobile robot and observed improved robustness to corruptions. The project website is: this https URL.

This work proposes a novel 2-D formation control scheme for acyclic triangulated directed graphs (a class of minimally acyclic persistent graphs) based on bipolar coordinates with (almost) global convergence to the desired shape. Prescribed performance control is employed to devise a decentralized control law that avoids singularities and introduces robustness against external disturbances while ensuring predefined transient and steady-state performance for the closed-loop system. Furthermore, it is shown that the proposed formation control scheme can handle formation maneuvering, scaling, and orientation specifications simultaneously. Additionally, the proposed control law is implementable in agents' arbitrarily oriented local coordinate frames using only low-cost onboard vision sensors, which are favorable for practical applications. Finally, a formation maneuvering simulation study verifies the proposed approach.

This paper proposes a funnel control method under time-varying hard and soft output constraints. First, an online funnel planning scheme is designed that generates a constraint consistent funnel, which always respects hard (safety) constraints, and soft (performance) constraints are met only when they are not conflicting with the hard constraints. Next, the prescribed performance control method is employed for designing a robust low-complexity funnel-based controller for uncertain nonlinear Euler-Lagrangian systems such that the outputs always remain within the planned constraint consistent funnels. Finally, the results are verified with a simulation example of a mobile robot tracking a moving object while staying in a box-constrained safe space.

Histopathologic analysis of stained tissue remains central to biomedical research and clinical care. Virtual staining (VS) offers a promising alternative, with potential to reduce costs and streamline workflows, yet hallucinations pose serious risks to clinical reliability. Here, we formalize the problem of hallucination detection in VS and propose a scalable post-hoc method: Neural Hallucination Precursor (NHP), which leverages the generator's latent space to preemptively flag hallucinations. Extensive experiments across diverse VS tasks show NHP is both effective and robust. Critically, we also find that models with fewer hallucinations do not necessarily offer better detectability, exposing a gap in current VS evaluation and underscoring the need for hallucination detection benchmarks.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication has been widely accepted as an enabler of 6G and other next-generation wireless networks, though high path loss strains link budgets, and difficult channel conditions have limited the deployment of mmWave within the 5G NR radio access network (RAN) primarily to dense urban environments. In this paper, we seek to demystify aspects of RAN planning and design for these environments by providing a set of empirical models of the mmWave channel at 28 GHz, alongside a methodology to develop spectrum consumption models (SCMs), which illustrate constraints on spectrum allocation by the RAN. We report on an extensive 28 GHz measurement campaign within the PAWR COSMOS testbed in New York City. This campaign resulted in over 46 million power measurements, collected from over 3,000 links across 24 street sidewalks at four different sites. Using these measurements, we study the effects of the setup and environments, such as TX height and seasonal effects. We then derive a series of channel models for path loss and the azimuth beamforming gain loss, and use them to derive distributions of the link SNR values achievable by UEs on the measured sidewalks. We show, among other results, that 100% of UEs on a given city block can achieve 10 dB SNR at locations with a strong street canyon effect. Finally, we develop a process to generate SCMs based on the IEEE 1900.5.2 standard using the empirical channel models. The generated SCMs facilitate the evaluation of spectrum sharing and interference management scenarios since they capture all directional propagation effects reflected in the measurements and provide a way to easily share the main propagation characterization results derived from the measurements. We believe that the models, methods, and results in this paper will help inform the future of mmWave wireless network deployments within dense urban areas.

Achieving a sustainable electricity infrastructure requires the explicit integration of carbon emissions into power system modeling and optimization. However, existing open-source test cases for power system research lack generator-level carbon profiling, preventing the benchmark of carbon-aware operational strategies. To address this gap, this work introduces PGLib-CO2, an open-source extension to the PGLib-OPF test case library. The proposed PGLib-CO2 enriches standard grid test cases with CO2 and CO2-equivalent emission intensity factors to achieve realistic, generator-level carbon profiling with an expanded list of fuel types. Using the standardized data, PGLib-CO2 allows us to enhance the algorithms for computing key carbon emission metrics. We first utilize the differentiable programming paradigm for computing LMCE by treating the OPF-based grid dispatch as a differentiable layer. This method provides a rigorous marginal sensitivity for general convex cost functions, eliminating the need of using a small incremental change in numerical perturbation. Moreover, to accelerate the real-time LMCE computation, we develop an MPP-based approach that shifts the optimization burden to offline phase of identifying the OPF critical regions. Since each critical region is characterized by a pre-computed affine dispatch function, the online phase reduces to identifying the region followed by efficiently evaluating the region-specific LMCE values. Numerical evaluations on IEEE test systems demonstrate that the differentiable LMCE computation attains the precise sensitivity information, and the MPP-based approach retrieves the LMCE signals faster than the direct optimization approach. By bridging high-fidelity data with advanced parametric computation, PGLib-CO2 provides a reproducible and computationally efficient foundation for future research in sustainable power system operations.

This paper investigates the design of output-feedback schemes for systems described by a class of recurrent neural networks. We propose a procedure based on linear matrix inequalities for designing an observer and a static state-feedback controller. The algorithm leverages global and regional incremental input-to-state stability (incremental ISS) and enables the tracking of constant setpoints, ensuring robustness to disturbances and state estimation uncertainty. To address the potential limitations of regional incremental ISS, we introduce an alternative scheme in which the static law is replaced with a tube-based nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) that exploits regional incremental ISS properties. We show that these conditions enable the formulation of a robust NMPC law with guarantees of convergence and recursive feasibility, leading to an enlarged region of attraction. Theoretical results are validated through numerical simulations on the pH-neutralisation process benchmark.

We introduce DeSTA2.5-Audio, a general-purpose Large Audio Language Model (LALM) designed for robust auditory perception and instruction-following. Recent LALMs augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with auditory capabilities by training on large-scale audio-instruction datasets. However, existing LALMs have often suffered from the catastrophic forgetting of the LLM's original abilities. Therefore, balancing knowledge retention and audio perception has become a critical challenge. To address this, we revisit the data construction pipeline and propose a self-generated cross-modal alignment strategy in which the backbone LLM generates its own training targets, named DeSTA. This approach aims at preserving the LLM's native language proficiency thereby enabling zero-shot generalization without task-specific tuning. We construct DeSTA-AQA5M, a large-scale, task-agnostic dataset containing 5 million training samples derived from 7,000 hours of audio spanning 50 diverse datasets, including speech, environmental sounds, and music. DeSTA2.5-Audio achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance across a wide range of audio-language benchmarks, including Dynamic-SUPERB, MMAU, SAKURA, Speech-IFEval, and VoiceBench. Comprehensive comparative studies demonstrate that our self-generated strategy outperforms existing training strategies. Our findings underscore the importance of carefully designed data construction in LALM development and offer practical insights for building robust, general-purpose LALMs.

This paper presents a data-driven approach for designing state observers for continuous-time nonlinear systems, where an extended dynamic mode decomposition (EDMD) procedure is used to identify an approximate linear lifted model. Since such a model on a finite-dimensional space spanned by the dictionary functions has an inevitable mismatch, we first establish, based on our theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert space with a linear-radial kernel, that the nonlinear error magnitude in the approximate linear model is sectorially bounded by the lifted state. The sector bound comprises a deterministic part due to the finite dictionary and a stochastic part due to the random data samples, and the observer design needs to account for both of these errors in a robust formulation. Hence, the observer synthesis is performed using linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), specified by the desired exponential decay rate of the observation error (when the system is asymptotically stable) or the L2-gain from the modeling error to the observation error. Numerical studies demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed method. As such, this work entails an explicit elementary use of linear systems theory for nonlinear state observation in a Koopman operator-theoretic framework.

Cellular wireless systems are facing a proliferation of frequency bands over a wide spectrum, particularly with the expansion into FR3. These bands must be supported in user equipment (UE) handsets with multiple antennas in a constrained form factor. Rapid variations in channel quality across the bands from motion and hand blockage, limited field-of-view of antennas, and hardware and power-constrained measurement sparsity pose significant challenges to reliable multi-band channel tracking. This paper formulates the problem of predicting achievable rates across multiple antenna arrays and bands with sparse historical measurements. We propose a transformer-based neural architecture that takes asynchronous rate histories as input and outputs per-array rate predictions. Evaluated on ray-traced simulations in a dense urban micro-cellular setting with FR1 and FR3 arrays, our method demonstrates superior performance over baseline predictors, enabling more informed band selection under realistic mobility and hardware constraints.

The high penetration of distributed energy resources, resulting in backfeed of power at the transmission and distribution interface, is causing conventional underfrequency load shedding (UFLS) schemes to become nonconforming. Adaptive schemes that update UFLS relay settings recursively in time offer a solution, but existing adaptive techniques that obtain UFLS relay settings with linearized or reduced-order model formulations fail to capture AC nonlinear network behavior. In practice, this will result in relays unable to restore system frequency during adverse disturbances. We formulate an adaptive UFLS problem as a trajectory optimization and include the full AC nonlinear network dynamics to ensure AC feasibility and time-coordinated control actions. We include binary decisions to model relay switching action and time-delayed multi-stage load-shedding. However, this formulation results in an intractable MINLP problem. To enforce model tractability, we relax these binary variables into continuous surrogates and reformulate the MINLP as a sequence of NLPs. We solve the NLPs with a homotopy-driven method that enforces near-integer-feasible solutions. We evaluate the framework on multiple synthetic transmission systems and demonstrate that it scales efficiently to networks exceeding 1500+ nodes with over 170k+ continuous and 73k+ binary decision variables, while successfully recovering binary-feasible solutions that arrest the frequency decline during worst-case disturbance.

Conventional acoustic beamformers typically assume short-time stationarity and process frequency bins independently, ignoring inter-frequency correlations. This is suboptimal for almost-periodic noise sources such as engines, fans, and musical instruments: these signals are better modeled as (almost) cyclostationary (ACS) processes with statistically correlated spectral components. This paper introduces the cyclic minimum power distortionless response (cMPDR) beamformer, which extends the conventional MPDR to jointly exploit spatial and spectral correlations. Building on frequency-shifted (FRESH) filtering, it suppresses noise components that are coherent across harmonically related frequencies, reducing residual noise beyond what spatial filtering alone achieves. To address inharmonicity, where partials deviate from exact integer multiples of a fundamental frequency, we estimate resonant frequencies from a periodogram and derive frequency shifts from their pairwise spacing. Theoretical analysis yields closed-form expressions for residual noise and proves that output power decreases monotonically with the number of cyclic components. Experiments on synthetic harmonic noise and real UAV motor recordings confirm these findings: in low-SNR scenarios, the cMPDR achieves up to 5dB improvement in SI-SDR over the MPDR, yields consistent STOI gains, and remains effective with a single microphone. When spectral correlation is absent, the method reduces to conventional MPDR and does not degrade performance. These results suggest that cyclic processing is a viable direction for acoustic noise reduction that deserves further investigation. Code is available at this https URL.

HAPS are emerging as key enablers in the evolution of 6G wireless networks, bridging terrestrial and non-terrestrial infrastructures. Operating in the stratosphere, HAPS can provide wide-area coverage, low-latency, energy-efficient broadband communications with flexible deployment options for diverse applications. This survey delivers a comprehensive overview of HAPS use cases, technologies, and integration strategies within the 6G ecosystem. The roles of HAPS in extending connectivity to underserved regions, supporting dynamic backhauling, enabling massive IoT, and delivering reliable low-latency communications for autonomous and immersive services are discussed. The paper reviews state-of-the-art architectures for terrestrial and non-terrestrial network integration, highlights recent field trials. Furthermore, key enabling technologies such as channel modeling, AI-driven resource allocation, interference control, mobility management, and energy-efficient communications are examined. The paper also outlines open research challenges. By addressing existing gaps in the literature, this survey positions HAPS as a foundational component of globally integrated, resilient, and sustainable 6G networks.

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is widely used as a non-invasive and accessible modality for continuous health monitoring. However, despite being a peripheral hemodynamic signal intrinsically coupled with systemic circulation, existing research has largely confined its scope to a narrow range of cardiovascular tasks, leaving a fundamental question underexplored: to what extent can PPG support holistic health profiling beyond traditional cardiovascular applications? To answer this question, we present AnyPPG, a foundation model-based framework designed to reveal the broader health-profiling potential of PPG. To ensure reliable performance for this investigation, AnyPPG is pretrained with ECG guidance on the most diverse PPG corpus with synchronized ECG to date, comprising over 100,000 hours of recordings from six large-scale data sources. This pretraining yields robust and physiologically grounded PPG representations that provide a reliable basis for subsequent analysis. Building upon this pretrained model, we conduct a systematic investigation into the association between PPG and holistic health through, to our knowledge, the first PPG-based phenome-wide disease detection study, spanning 1,468 disease phenotypes in more than 15,000 subjects. Our evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of AnyPPG: across eight clinical and wearable datasets covering 15 downstream tasks, it achieves the best performance in 13 tasks. More importantly, in the phenome-wide analysis, AnyPPG exhibits meaningful discriminative capability (AUC $\ge$ 0.70) for 307 phenotypes across 16 distinct phecode chapters, including 230 non-circulatory conditions such as dementia and chronic kidney disease, many of which have rarely been explored using PPG. Collectively, these findings indicate that easily acquired PPG signals encode rich health-related information extending well beyond conventional cardiovascular assessment.

In this paper, we propose a novel blockage-aware hierarchical beamforming framework for movable antenna (MA) systems operating at millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) frequencies. While existing works on MA systems have demonstrated performance gains over conventional systems, they often neglect the design of specialized codebooks to leverage MA's unique capabilities and address the challenges of increased energy consumption and latency inherent to MA systems. To address these aspects, we first integrate blockage detection into the codebook design process based on the Gerchberg-Saxton (GS) algorithm, significantly reducing inefficiencies due to beam evaluations done in blocked directions. Then, we use a two-stage approach to reduce the complexity of the joint beamforming and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) optimization problem. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed adaptive codebook successfully improves the Energy Efficiency (EE) and reduces the beam training overhead, substantially boosting the practical deployment potential of RIS-assisted MA systems in future wireless networks.

Hierarchical LiDAR geometry compression encodes voxel occupancies from low to high bit-depths, yet prior methods treat each depth independently and re-estimate local context from coordinates at every level, limiting compression efficiency. We present ELiC, a real-time framework that combines cross-bit-depth feature propagation, a Bag-of-Encoders (BoE) selection scheme, and a Morton-order-preserving hierarchy. Cross-bit-depth propagation reuses features extracted at denser, lower depths to support prediction at sparser, higher depths. BoE selects, per depth, the most suitable coding network from a small pool, adapting capacity to observed occupancy statistics without training a separate model for each level. The Morton hierarchy maintains global Z-order across depth transitions, eliminating per-level sorting and reducing latency. Together these components improve entropy modeling and computation efficiency, yielding state-of-the-art compression at real-time throughput on Ford and SemanticKITTI. Code and pretrained models are available at this https URL.

While supervised fine-tuning of adult pre-trained models for children's ASR has shown promise, it often fails to capture group-specific characteristics and variations among children. To address this, we introduce GRoup-Aware PARtial model Merging, a parameter-efficient approach that combines unsupervised clustering, partial fine-tuning, and model merging. Our approach adapts adult-pre-trained models to children by first grouping the children's data based on acoustic similarity. Each group is used to partially fine-tune an adult pre-trained model, and the resulting models are merged at the parameter level. Experiments conducted on the MyST children's speech corpus indicate that GRAPAM achieves a relative WER improvement of 6%, using the same amount of data, outperforming full fine-tuning while training fewer parameters.

Magnetic particle imaging reconstructs tracer distributions using a system matrix obtained through time-consuming, noise-prone calibration measurements. Methods for addressing imperfections in measured system matrices increasingly rely on deep neural networks, yet curated training data remain scarce. This study evaluates whether physics-based simulated system matrices can be used to train deep learning models for different system matrix restoration tasks, i.e., denoising, accelerated calibration, upsampling, and inpainting, that generalize to measured data. A large system matrices dataset was generated using an equilibrium magnetization model extended with uniaxial anisotropy. The dataset spans particle, scanner, and calibration parameters for 2D and 3D trajectories, and includes background noise injected from empty-frame measurements. For each restoration task, deep learning models were compared with classical non-learning baseline methods. The models trained solely on simulated system matrices generalized to measured data across all tasks: for denoising, DnCNN/RDN/SwinIR outperformed DCT-F baseline by >10 dB PSNR and up to 0.1 SSIM on simulations and led to perceptually better reconstuctions of real data; for 2D upsampling, SMRnet exceeded bicubic by 20 dB PSNR and 0.08 SSIM at $\times 2$-$\times 4$ which did not transfer qualitatively to real measurements. For 3D accelerated calibration, SMRnet matched tricubic in noiseless cases and was more robust under noise, and for 3D inpainting, biharmonic inpainting was superior when noise-free but degraded with noise, while a PConvUNet maintained quality and yielded less blurry reconstructions. The demonstrated transferability of deep learning models trained on simulations to real measurements mitigates the data-scarcity problem and enables the development of new methods beyond current measurement capabilities.

Optimal AP clustering and power allocation are critical in user-centric cell-free massive MIMO systems. Existing deep learning models lack flexibility to handle dynamic network configurations. Furthermore, many approaches overlook pilot contamination and suffer from high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a lightweight transformer model that overcomes these limitations by jointly predicting AP clusters and powers solely from spatial coordinates of user devices and AP. Our model is architecture-agnostic to users load, handles both clustering and power allocation without channel estimation overhead, and eliminates pilot contamination by assigning users to AP within a pilot reuse constraint. We also incorporate a customized linear attention mechanism to capture user-AP interactions efficiently and enable linear scalability with respect to the number of users. Numerical results confirm the model's effectiveness in maximizing the minimum spectral efficiency and providing near-optimal performance while ensuring adaptability and scalability in dynamic scenarios.

Electric vehicles with multiple motors provide a flexibility in meeting the driver torque demand, which calls for minimizing the battery energy consumption through torque allocation. In this paper, we present an approach to this problem based on approximating electric motor losses using higher-order polynomials with specific properties. To ensure a well-behaved optimization landscape, monotonicity and positivity constraints are imposed on the polynomial models using sum of squares programming. This methodology provides robustness against noisy or sparse data, while retaining the computational efficiency of a polynomial function approximation. The torque allocation problem based on such polynomials is formulated as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem and solved efficiently using readily available solvers. In the nominal case, the first-order necessary conditions for optimality can also be used to obtain a global solution. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on several certification driving cycles against a grid search-based benchmark. Results show a modest influence on electric energy consumption, while enabling real-time optimization and integration with other vehicle control systems.

Synthetic data generation is an appealing tool for augmenting and enriching datasets, playing a crucial role in advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Not only does synthetic data help build robust AI/ML datasets cost-effectively, but it also offers privacy-friendly solutions and bypasses the complexities of storing large data volumes. This paper proposes a novel method to generate synthetic data, based on first-order auto-regressive noise statistics, for large-scale Wi-Fi deployments. The approach operates with minimal real data requirements while producing statistically rich traffic patterns that effectively mimic real Access Point (AP) behavior. Experimental results show that ML models trained on synthetic data achieve Mean Absolute Error (MAE) values within 10 to 15 of those obtained using real data when trained on the same APs, while requiring significantly less training data. Moreover, when generalization is required, synthetic-data-trained models improve prediction accuracy by up to 50 percent compared to real-data-trained baselines, thanks to the enhanced variability and diversity of the generated traces. Overall, the proposed method bridges the gap between synthetic data generation and practical Wi-Fi traffic forecasting, providing a scalable, efficient, and real-time solution for modern wireless networks.

This paper presents an LMI-based design framework for multirate steady-state Kalman filters in systems with sensors operating at different sampling rates. The multirate system is formulated as a periodic time-varying system, where the Kalman gains converge to periodic steady-state values that repeat every frame period. Cyclic reformulation transforms this into a time-invariant problem; however, the resulting measurement noise covariance becomes semidefinite rather than positive definite, preventing direct application of standard Riccati equation methods. I address this through a dual LQR formulation with LMI optimization that naturally handles semidefinite covariances. The framework enables multi-objective design, supporting pole placement for guaranteed convergence rates and $l_2$-induced norm constraints for balancing average and worst-case performance. Numerical validation using an automotive navigation system with GPS and wheel speed sensors, including Monte Carlo simulation with 500 independent noise realizations, demonstrates that the proposed filter achieves a position RMSE well below the GPS noise level through effective multirate sensor fusion, and that the LMI solution provides valid upper bounds on the estimation error covariance.

The impact of routine smaller outages on distribution system customers in terms of customer minutes interrupted can be tracked using conventional reliability indices. However, the customer minutes interrupted in large blackout events are extremely variable, and this makes it difficult to quantify the customer impact of these extreme events with resilience metrics. We solve this problem with the System Average Large Event Duration Index SALEDI that logarithmically transforms the customer minutes interrupted. We explain how this new resilience metric works, compare it with alternatives, quantify its statistical accuracy, and illustrate its practical use with standard outage data from five utilities.

This paper introduces an uncertainty compensation-based robust adaptive model predictive control (MPC) framework for linear systems with nonlinear time-varying uncertainties. The framework integrates an L1 adaptive controller to compensate for the matched uncertainty and a robust feedback controller, designed using linear matrix inequalities, to mitigate the effect of unmatched uncertainty on target output channels. Uniform bounds on the errors between the system's states and control inputs and those of a nominal (i.e., uncertainty-free) system are derived. These error bounds are then used to tighten the actual system's state and input constraints, enabling the design of an MPC for the nominal system under these tightened constraints. Referred to as uncertainty compensation-based MPC (UC-MPC), this approach ensures constraint satisfaction while delivering enhanced performance compared to existing methods. Simulation results for a flight control example and a spacecraft landing on an asteroid demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

This paper develops a control-theoretic framework for analyzing agentic systems embedded within feedback control loops, where an AI agent may adapt controller parameters, select among control strategies, invoke external tools, reconfigure decision architectures, and modify control objectives during operation. These capabilities are formalized by interpreting agency as hierarchical runtime decision authority over elements of the control architecture, leading to an augmented closed-loop representation in which physical states, internal memory, tool outputs, interaction signals, and design variables evolve as a coupled dynamical system. A five-level hierarchy of agency is defined, ranging from fixed control laws to runtime synthesis of control architectures and objectives. The analysis shows that increasing agency introduces interacting dynamical mechanisms such as time-varying adaptation, endogenous switching, decision-induced delays, and structural reconfiguration. The framework is developed in both nonlinear and linear settings, providing explicit design constraints for AI-enabled control systems in safety-critical applications.

The expression of affect is integral to spoken communication, yet, its link to underlying articulatory execution remains unclear. Measures of articulatory muscle activity such as EMG could reveal how speech production is modulated by emotion alongside acoustic speech analyses. We investigate affect decoding from facial and neck surface electromyography (sEMG) during phonated and silent speech production. For this purpose, we introduce a dataset comprising 2,780 utterances from 12 participants across 3 tasks, on which we evaluate both intra- and inter-subject decoding using a range of features and model embeddings. Our results reveal that EMG representations reliably discriminate frustration with up to 0.845 AUC, and generalize well across articulation modes. Our ablation study further demonstrates that affective signatures are embedded in facial motor activity and persist in the absence of phonation, highlighting the potential of EMG sensing for affect-aware silent speech interfaces.

Large-scale AI training workloads in modern data centers exhibit rapid and periodic power fluctuations, which may induce significant voltage deviations in power distribution systems. Existing voltage regulation methods, such as droop control, are primarily designed for slowly varying loads and may therefore be ineffective in mitigating these fast fluctuations. In addition, repeated control actions can incur substantial cost. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a decentralized switching-reference voltage control framework that exploits the structured behavior of AI training workloads. We establish conditions for voltage convergence and characterize an effective reference design that aligns with the two dominant operating levels of the AI training workload. The switching rule for voltage references is implemented solely using local voltage measurements, enabling simple local implementation while significantly reducing control effort. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method substantially reduces both voltage deviations and reactive control effort, while remaining compatible with internal data center control strategies without requiring extensive coordination.

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is a key technology for next-generation wireless communication systems. By deploying significantly more antennas than conventional massive MIMO systems, XL-MIMO promises substantial improvements in spectral efficiency. However, due to the drastically increased array size, the conventional planar wave channel model is no longer accurate, necessitating a transition to a near-field spherical wave model. This shift challenges traditional beam training and channel estimation methods, which were designed for planar wave propagation. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art beam training and channel estimation techniques for XL-MIMO systems. We analyze the fundamental principles, key methodologies, and recent advancements in this area, highlighting their respective strengths and limitations in addressing the challenges posed by the near-field propagation environment. Furthermore, we explore open research challenges that remain unresolved to provide valuable insights for researchers and engineers working toward the development of next-generation XL-MIMO communication systems.

Accurately modeling friction in robotics remains a core challenge, as robotics simulators like MuJoCo and PyBullet use simplified friction models or heuristics to balance computational efficiency with accuracy, where these simplifications and approximations can lead to substantial differences between simulated and physical performance. In this paper, we present a physics-informed friction estimation framework that enables the integration of well-established friction models with learnable components, requiring only minimal, generic measurement data. Our approach enforces physical consistency yet retains the flexibility to capture complex friction phenomena. We demonstrate, on an underactuated and nonlinear system, that the learned friction models, trained solely on small and noisy datasets, accurately reproduce dynamic friction properties with significantly higher fidelity than the simplified models commonly used in robotics simulators. Crucially, we show that our approach enables the learned models to be transferable to systems they are not trained on. This ability to generalize across multiple systems streamlines friction modeling for complex, underactuated tasks, offering a scalable and interpretable path toward improving friction model accuracy in robotics and control.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-enabled integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is regarded as a key enabler for next-generation wireless systems. However, conventional fixed-position antennas limit the ability of UAVs to fully exploit their inherent potential. To overcome this limitation, we propose a UAV-enabled ISAC framework equipped with fluid antennas (FAs), where the mobility of antenna elements introduces additional spatial degrees of freedom to simultaneously enhance communication and sensing performance. A multi-objective optimization problem is formulated to maximize the communication rates of multiple users while minimizing the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for the angle estimation of a single target. Due to excessively frequent updates of FA positions may lead to response delay, a three-timescale optimization framework is developed to jointly optimize transmit beamforming, FA positions, and UAV trajectory based on their characteristics. To solve the non-convexity of the problem, an alternating optimization-based algorithm is developed to obtain a sub-optimal solution. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms various benchmark schemes, validating the effectiveness of integrating the FA technology into the UAV-enabled ISAC systems.

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) integrate audio encoders with pretrained Large Language Models to perform complex multimodal reasoning tasks. While these models can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) explanations, the faithfulness of these reasoning chains remains unclear. In this work, we propose a systematic framework to evaluate CoT faithfulness in LALMs with respect to both the input audio and the final model prediction. We define three criteria for audio faithfulness: hallucination-free, holistic, and attentive listening. We also introduce a benchmark based on both audio and CoT interventions to assess faithfulness. Experiments on Audio Flamingo 3 and Qwen2.5-Omni suggest a potential multimodal disconnect: reasoning often aligns with the final prediction but is not always strongly grounded in the audio and can be vulnerable to hallucinations or adversarial perturbations.

The optimal controller design problem for a linear, first-order spatially-invariant distributed parameter system is considered. Through a case study of the Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem for the diffusion equation over the torus, it is illustrated that the optimal controller design problem can be equivalently formulated as an optimization problem over the system's closed-loop mappings, analogous to the System Level Synthesis framework. This reformulation is solved analytically to recover the LQR for the diffusion equation, and an internally stable implementation of this controller is recovered from the optimal closed-loop mappings. It is further demonstrated that a class of spatio-temporal constraints on the closed-loop maps can be imposed on this closed-loop formulation while preserving convexity.

Hallucinations in multimodal models have been extensively studied using benchmarks that probe reliability in image-text query settings. However, the effect of spoken queries on multimodal hallucinations remains largely unexplored, despite the growing role of voice interfaces. In this paper, we introduce a systematic pipeline that converts existing multimodal hallucination benchmarks into spoken-query versions while preserving the original tasks and labels. We instantiate this pipeline on RePOPE and release RePOPE-Spk, where all queries are provided as spoken audio under diverse input conditions. Experimental results show that hallucinations escalate when queries are spoken rather than written: error rates increase by 3-6% with clean speech and by up to 30% under environmental noise. Furthermore, many-shot prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning provide only partial mitigation. Our findings motivate new directions for building reliable voice interface systems and evaluations.

Soft robots offer significant advantages in safety and adaptability, yet achieving precise and dynamic control remains a major challenge due to their inherently complex and nonlinear dynamics. Recently, Data-enabled Predictive Control (DeePC) has emerged as a promising model-free approach that bypasses explicit system identification by directly leveraging input-output data. While DeePC has shown success in other domains, its application to soft robots remains underexplored, particularly for three-dimensional (3D) soft robotic systems. This paper addresses this gap by developing and experimentally validating an effective DeePC framework on a 3D, cable-driven soft arm. Specifically, we design and fabricate a soft robotic arm with a thick tubing backbone for stability, a dense silicone body with large cavities for strength and flexibility, and rigid endcaps for secure termination. Using this platform, we implement DeePC with singular value decomposition (SVD)-based dimension reduction for two key control tasks: fixed-point regulation and trajectory tracking in 3D space. Comparative experiments with a baseline model-based controller demonstrate DeePC's superior accuracy, robustness, and adaptability, highlighting its potential as a practical solution for dynamic control of soft robots.

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models hold significant promise for universal Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). However, existing approaches often rely on end-to-end fine-tuning and exhibit limited efficacy under frozen-probing protocols, lacking the intrinsic universality required for broad generalization. This limitation stems from adapting general-purpose sequence architectures that overlook the biophysical and dynamical principles of neural activity. To bridge this gap, we propose DeeperBrain, a neuro-grounded foundation model integrating domain-specific inductive biases into its model design and learning objectives. Architecturally, DeeperBrain incorporates a volume conduction-aware channel encoding to model spatial mixing via 3D geometry, and a neurodynamics-aware temporal encoding capturing slow adaptations using oscillatory and exponential bases. For pretraining, we introduce a dual-objective strategy combining Masked EEG Reconstruction (MER) for local fidelity and Neurodynamics Statistics Prediction (NSP). NSP enforces alignment with macroscopic brain states by predicting interpretable order parameters, including spectral power, functional connectivity, cross-frequency coupling, and dynamic complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeeperBrain achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance under end-to-end fine-tuning. Crucially, it maintains superior efficacy under a rigorous frozen-probing protocol, verifying that embedding neuroscientific first principles endows learned representations with the intrinsic universality essential for universal BCI. The code will be publicly available.

We study federated learning (FL) over wireless fading channels where multiple devices simultaneously send their model updates. We propose an efficient age-aware edge-blind over-the-air FL approach that does not require channel state information (CSI) at the devices. Instead, the parameter server (PS) uses multiple antennas and applies maximum-ratio combining (MRC) based on its estimated sum of the channel gains to detect the parameter updates. A key challenge is that the number of orthogonal subcarriers is limited; thus, transmitting many parameters requires multiple Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) symbols, which increases latency. To address this, the PS selects only a small subset of model coordinates each round using AgeTop-k, which first picks the largest-magnitude entries and then chooses the k coordinates with the longest waiting times since they were last selected. This ensures that all selected parameters fit into a single OFDM symbol, reducing latency. We provide a convergence bound that highlights the advantages of using a higher number of antenna array elements and demonstrates a key trade-off: increasing k decreases compression error at the cost of increasing the effect of channel noise. Experimental results show that (i) more PS antennas greatly improve accuracy and convergence speed; (ii) AgeTop-k outperforms random selection under relatively good channel conditions; and (iii) the optimum k depends on the channel, with smaller k being better in noisy settings.

The superconducting qubit quantum computer is one of the most promising quantum computing architectures for large-scale integration due to its maturity and close proximity to the well-established semiconductor manufacturing infrastructure. From an education perspective, it also bridges classical microwave electronics and quantum electrodynamics. In this paper, we will review the basics of quantum computers, superconductivity, and Josephson junctions. We then introduce important technologies and concepts related to DiVincenzo's criteria, which are the necessary conditions for the superconducting qubits to work as a useful quantum computer. Firstly, we will discuss various types of superconducting qubits formed with Josephson junctions, from which we will understand the trade-off across multiple design parameters, including their noise immunity. Secondly, we will discuss different schemes to achieve entanglement gate operations, which are a major bottleneck in achieving more efficient fault-tolerant quantum computing. Thirdly, we will review readout engineering, including the implementations of the Purcell filters and quantum-limited amplifiers. Finally, we will discuss the nature and review the studies of two-level system defects, which are currently the limiting factor of qubit coherence time. DiVincenzo's criteria are only the necessary conditions for a technology to be eligible for quantum computing. To have a useful quantum computer, large-scale integration is required. We will review proposals and developments for the large-scale integration of superconducting qubit devices. By comparing with the application of electronic design automation (EDA) in semiconductors, we will also review the use of EDA in superconducting qubit quantum computer design, which is necessary for its large-scale integration.

The leader-following consensus problem for general linear multi-agent systems over jointly connected switching networks has been a challenging problem and the solvability of the problem has been limited to the class of linear multi-agent systems whose system matrix is marginally stable. This condition is restrictive since it even excludes the most commonly used double-integrator system. This paper presents a breakthrough by demonstrating that leader-following exponential consensus is achievable for general linear multi-agent systems over jointly connected switching networks, even when the system matrix is exponentially unstable. The degree of instability can be explicitly characterized by two key quantities that arise from the jointly connected condition on a switching graph. By exploiting duality, we further show that the output-based distributed observer design problem for a general leader system is solvable over jointly connected switching networks, even when the system matrix is exponentially unstable. This is also in sharp contrast to the existing distributed observers, which rely on the assumption that the leader system is marginally stable.

Selecting the right deep learning model for power grid forecasting is challenging, as performance heavily depends on the data available to the operator. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmark of five modern neural architectures: two state space models (PowerMamba, S-Mamba), two Transformers (iTransformer, PatchTST), and a traditional LSTM. We evaluate these models on hourly electricity demand across six diverse US power grids for forecast windows between 24 and 168 hours. To ensure a fair comparison, we adapt each model with specialized temporal processing and a modular layer that cleanly integrates weather covariates. Our results reveal that there is no single best model for all situations. When forecasting using only historical load, PatchTST and the state space models provide the highest accuracy. However, when explicit weather data is added to the inputs, the rankings reverse: iTransformer improves its accuracy three times more efficiently than PatchTST. By controlling for model size, we confirm that this advantage stems from the architecture's inherent ability to mix information across different variables. Extending our evaluation to solar generation, wind power, and wholesale prices further demonstrates that model rankings depend on the forecast task: PatchTST excels on highly rhythmic signals like solar, while state space models are better suited for the chaotic fluctuations of wind and price. Ultimately, this benchmark provides grid operators with actionable guidelines for selecting the optimal forecasting architecture based on their specific data environments.

In energy system analysis, coupling models with mismatched spatial resolutions is a significant challenge. A common solution is assigning weights to high-resolution geographic units for aggregation, but traditional models are limited by using only a single geospatial attribute. This paper presents an innovative method employing a self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network to address this issue. This method models high-resolution geographic units as graph nodes, integrating various geographical features to generate physically meaningful weights for each grid point. These weights enhance the conventional Voronoi-based allocation method, allowing it to go beyond simply geographic proximity by incorporating essential geographic this http URL addition, the self-supervised learning paradigm overcomes the lack of accurate ground-truth data. Experimental results demonstrate that applying weights generated by this method to cluster-based Voronoi Diagrams significantly enhances scalability, accuracy, and physical plausibility, while increasing precision compared to traditional methods.

Voice biometric systems can exhibit sex-related performance gaps even when overall verification accuracy is strong. We attribute these gaps to two practical mechanisms: (i) demographic shortcut learning, where speaker classification training exploits spurious correlations between sex and speaker identity, and (ii) feature entanglement, where sex-linked acoustic variation overlaps with identity cues and cannot be removed without degrading speaker discrimination. We propose Fair-Gate, a fairness-aware and interpretable risk-gating framework that addresses both mechanisms in a single pipeline. Fair-Gate applies risk extrapolation to reduce variation in speaker-classification risk across proxy sex groups, and introduces a local complementary gate that routes intermediate features into an identity branch and a sex branch. The gate provides interpretability by producing an explicit routing mask that can be inspected to understand which features are allocated to identity versus sex-related pathways. Experiments on VoxCeleb1 show that Fair-Gate improves the utility--fairness trade-off, yielding more sex-fair ASV performance under challenging evaluation conditions.

Large-scale MIMO detection remains challenging because exact or near-maximum-likelihood search is difficult to scale, while available quantum resources are insufficient for directly solving full-size detection instances by QAOA. This paper therefore proposes a Block-QAOA-Aware MIMO Detector (BQA-MD), whose primary purpose is to reorganize the detection chain so that it becomes compatible with limited-qubit local quantum subproblems. Specifically, BQA-MD combines block-QAOA-aware preprocessing in the QR domain, a standards-consistent blockwise 5G NR Gray-HUBO interface, an MMSE-induced dynamic regularized blockwise objective, and K-best candidate propagation. Within this framework, fixed-size block construction gives every local subproblem a uniform circuit width and parameter dimension, which in turn enables parameter-transfer QAOA as a practical realization strategy for structurally matched local subproblems. Experiments are conducted on a 16x16 Rayleigh MIMO system with 16QAM using classical simulation of the quantum subroutine. The results show that the regularized blockwise detector improves upon its unregularized counterpart, validating the adopted blockwise objective and the block-QAOA-aware design rationale. They also show that the parameter-transfer QAOA detector nearly matches the regularized blockwise exhaustive reference and clearly outperforms direct-training QAOA in BER, thereby supporting parameter reuse as the preferred QAOA realization strategy within the proposed framework. In the tested setting, MMSE remains slightly better in the low-SNR region, whereas the parameter-transfer QAOA detector becomes highly competitive from the medium-SNR regime onward.

Complex engineered systems require coordinated design choices across heterogeneous components under multiple conflicting objectives and uncertain specifications. Monotone co-design provides a compositional framework for such problems by modeling each subsystem as a design problem: a feasible relation between provided functionalities and required resources in partially ordered sets. Existing uncertain co-design models rely on interval bounds, which support worst-case reasoning but cannot represent probabilistic risk or multi-stage adaptive decisions. We develop a distributional extension of co-design that models uncertain design outcomes as distributions over design problems and supports adaptive decision processes through Markov-kernel re-parameterizations. Using quasi-measurable and quasi-universal spaces, we show that the standard co-design interconnection operations remain compositional under this richer notion of uncertainty. We further introduce queries and observations that extract probabilistic design trade-offs, including feasibility probabilities, confidence bounds, and distributions of minimal required resources. A task-driven unmanned aerial vehicle case study illustrates how the framework captures risk-sensitive and information-dependent design choices that interval-based models cannot express.