Adopting an intuitive approach, this letter shows the derivation of three orthogonal real matrices based on the Fourier matrix. Only elementary methods are employed.

Public chest-radiograph (CXR) datasets are typically released with small, fixed label schemas such as CheXpert-14. However, the underlying free-text reports describe far more findings -- and which findings matter depends on the task, site, and reader. We release a pipeline that converts free-text reports into multi-label matrices and then reconfigures the label schema through dictionary edits rather than new inference passes, i.e., without relabeling the corpus. After this one-time pass, reconfiguring MIMIC-CXR (223K reports) from cached annotations takes 196 seconds with no API cost, compared to \$6.6K for an equivalent relabeling pass with Claude Opus 4.7. Using a 58-label taxonomy, we show that 43\% of CXR studies contain at least one finding outside CheXpert-14. Image probes trained on these labels match CheXpert-14 probes on shared targets while also reaching 0.78 AUROC on expert-reviewed long-tail labels that CheXpert-14 cannot represent. These results suggest a different unit of work for radiology labeling: once reports are structured, the label schema becomes a configuration to edit, not a corpus to relabel.

Heart rate measurement is one of the key requirements for real-time health monitoring, in particular for health caring of elderly people. Traditional heart rate measurement relies on contact sensing mechanisms such as some heart rate measurement devices at medical hospitals or some wearable devices with embedded sensors such as Apple Watch, etc. In this paper, we develop a system for non-contact, real-time, heart rate measurement using image processing with commodity cameras such as an embedded camera on a laptop, where we use an innovative algorithm to capture the relevant signals for the computation of heart rate in a time series in real life environments. The presented heart rate computation (HRC) process is composed with four major steps: (a) identify frames per second of the camera in use, i.e., 30 frames per second for a given camera, (b) face detection (FD) with shape predictor of 68 face landmarks using deep learning (DL) method, (c) time sliding window (TSW) algorithm to de-noise the signal by smoothing out the noise, and (d) compute heart rate based on identified signal periodicity. We test and analyze the developed prototypes against heart rate results by Apple Watch and check the difference range in multiple rounds and compute the mean of the difference for the measurement values of the heart rate of the same person at the same time. We will do further tuning and optimization of the present methods and deploy the system as a personal AI agent [6] for health monitoring as our future directions.

Image forgery detection is a critical task in digital forensics, yet many deep-learning localization approaches are typically GPU-accelerated and computationally heavier than handcrafted screening methods. We propose a lightweight, interpretable feature engineering pipeline for image-level forgery screening using only CPU computation and gradient boosted trees. Our method introduces \emph{multi-scale Error Level Analysis} (ELA) computed at seven JPEG quality levels, combined with novel \emph{cross-quality ELA ratio} features that capture double-compression artifacts characteristic of spliced regions, augmented by spatial entropy, FFT energy bands, edge density, SRM residuals, and DCT blockiness, yielding a 405-dimensional feature vector. CASIA v2.0 contains a format confound (60\% of tampered images are TIFF while authentic images are JPEG/BMP and contain no TIFF samples), enabling a trivial \texttt{is\_tiff} classifier to reach 0.80 AUC. We address this through rigorous format-controlled evaluation: on the JPEG-only subset (9,501 images, eliminating the TIFF/JPEG container confound), our method achieves AUC~=~0.990 [95\% CI: 0.988--0.991] and F1~=~0.905 using 5-fold stratified cross-validation. Under a conservative source-aware group split (preventing related images from appearing in both train and test), AUC remains 0.976. An ablation study reveals that multi-scale ELA provides the dominant gain (+0.180 AUC over single-quality on the format-controlled subset), while cross-quality ratios provide complementary double-compression detection. These results support that the method detects compression-history inconsistencies rather than file-format shortcuts -- while offering feature-level interpretability, CPU-only deployment, and sub-second inference.

Utilities increasingly rely on planning and operational tools to cope with the increased penetrations of distributed energy resources, yet the lack of realistic, openly available datasets remains a major barrier for benchmarking and comparison. Traditional test feeders, and recently proposed large-scale synthetic networks alleviate this issue but are typically based on heuristic rules and do not learn directly from data. This paper proposes a generative framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create power distribution network layouts using image-based representations. The model is trained on rasterised views of distribution systems and can operate in two modes: an unconditional configuration that learns layout patterns from the training dataset, and conditional configurations that incorporate geographical context such as street maps and the spatial distribution of consumers. The methodology includes dataset preparation from Geographic Information System (GIS) sources, GAN architecture design, and the analysis of training stability and image resolution. Results from three representative cases show that the proposed approach can reproduce the topologies of low (LV), medium (MV) and high voltage (HV) feeders and align generated layouts with underlying geographical structures. At the same time, the study reveals limitations related to training stability, resolution-dependent artefacts and limits, and the absence of explicit electrical constraints. The proposed framework constitutes a data-driven complement to existing synthetic network generation methods, and could be applied to propose distribution network layouts for the electrification of new areas. This would require future extensions towards power flow, electrically validated models.

This paper proposes Variational Inference-based Bayesian Estimation with Sobol screening (VIBES), a two-stage scalable framework for Bayesian uncertainty quantification (UQ). The proposed approach combines Sobol global sensitivity analysis (GSA) for screening and dimensionality reduction, followed by variational inference (VI) for UQ of kinetic, design/operational, and economic parameters. In the first stage, Sobol GSA is performed to identify dominant variables and parameters governing uncertainty in process outputs. In the second stage, Bayesian inference is performed only on the reduced dimensional space using VI, thus reducing computational burden and enhancing scalability. The framework is demonstrated on a process for bioadhesive production through base-catalyzed depolymerization of kraft lignin and subsequent crosslinking with isolated soy protein. A Python-Aspen interface is developed for automated simulation and parameter estimation, enabling Bayesian calibration through stochastic gradient-based optimization and automatic-differentiation. The methodology is generic and readily generalizable to other biomass conversion pathways. The results show that application of VIBES consistently reduces predictive uncertainty bounds across all model outputs by more than 80%, even when only the reduced-space input variables and parameters are optimized during Bayesian estimation. The framework can be potentially applied for scalable, uncertainty-aware decision-making in high-dimensional, complex chemical process systems.

Lane-change, a triggering of traffic disturbances to the upstream vehicles, is detrimental to traffic safety and efficiency. Coupled with car-following behavior, the joint maneuvers depict the general picture of how traffic disturbances generate and propagate through vehicle streams, especially under traffic congestion. This study proposes an integrated control framework for lane-changing and car-following for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), where those two tasks are largely treated as independent driving tasks by prevailing methods. Utilizing the Parametrized Deep Q-Network (P-DQN) with a hybrid action space, the framework adeptly models multiple objectives in CAV control. The P-DQN's high-level control is employed for discrete lane-change decisions, while its low-level control manages continuous acceleration actions, i.e., lateral and longitudinal acceleration. These actions are interdependently determined, seamlessly integrating car-following and lane-changing control. By training to maximize cumulative rewards, the proposed control strategy ensures driving safety as well as the efficiency of car-following, lane-changing, and lane-keeping. Through numerical experiments, it is indicated that the P-DQN outperforms separated control methods, e.g., the combination of the Minimizing Overall Braking Decelerations Induced by Lane Changes (MOBIL) model and the Intelligent Driver Model (IDM), in terms of safety and comfort.

Open physiological corpora are heterogeneous: they use different sensors, labels, sampling rates, recording settings, and clinical endpoints. They can support detector design, but they do not directly specify which detector rules should be built for a new contactless monitoring platform. We report a controlled four-analyst large-language-model (LLM) workflow for converting 68 public physiological corpora, screened for commercial-use compatibility, into an auditable library of candidate rule shapes for prospective validation. Four independent commercial LLM families read the corpus documentation under a controlled prompt and produced 695 candidate rule markers (top-markers). Deduplication retained 649 rule records; a threshold-bounds audit then flagged 51 sanity violations for clamping or curator review. Cross-corpus consolidation produced 436 unique rule shapes. Gate-tagging against two hard invariants, native target-hardware channel availability and no multi-night per-patient personalization, identified 94 build-now detector components across four detector-family buckets. The pipeline does not produce a validated clinical detector. It produces an auditable engineering cascade in which analyst disagreement, threshold checks, curator review, and automated continuous-integration (CI) checks route literature-derived rules toward prospective hardware validation.

The increasing penetration of inverter-based resources (IBRs) into bulk power systems has fundamentally altered short-term voltage dynamics following disturbances. Conventional short-circuit capacity (SCC) metrics provide a useful screening indicator of grid strength but are unable to fully capture post-disturbance voltage behavior at buses with dynamic loads, converter controls, or protection interactions. A bus with high SCC may still experience deep voltage dips, delayed recovery, or transient overvoltage that violates operating criteria. This paper proposes the Short-Term Voltage Performance Index (STVPI), an electromagnetic-transient (EMT)-based, criteria-aware metric that quantifies the quality of the post-disturbance voltage waveform relative to user-defined performance limits. STVPI processes voltage signals at the half-cycle level by computing a weighted log-amplitude ratio between the actual waveform and an ideal half-sine reference. Monotonic recovery envelopes on the overvoltage and undervoltage sides are compared against half-normal reference distributions using Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence, normalized by the KL divergence of the critical voltage envelope, yielding two directional indices -- $\mathrm{STVPI}^{+}$ and $\mathrm{STVPI}^{-}$ -- whose combination produces a baseline-corrected scalar severity score. Bus-level and event-level aggregation derive BSTVPI and ESTVPI, enabling simultaneous identification of dynamically weak buses and critical fault contingencies. The framework is validated on the IEEE 9-bus and 39-bus test systems with IBR integration.

Speech large language models (Speech LLMs) typically encode speech into sequences far longer than text, creating a major efficiency bottleneck during autoregressive decoding. A common remedy is to compress the speech sequence at the adapter level to remove temporal redundancy before it enters the LLM; however, such early downsampling risks discarding fine-grained information that cannot be recovered. We propose SpeechKV, which applies a learned pooling to the KV cache of speech tokens inside the LLM. This design allows the LLM to fuse speech and text internally while directly accelerating decoding. Trained on 71K hours of speech data, SpeechKV compresses the speech to approximately text-level granularity yet maintains performance on par with or even slightly better than the uncompressed baseline, with relative gains of 6.6% on out-of-domain entity recognition and 2.3% on OpenASR, while delivering at least 1.49 times decoding speedup that scales with audio length.

Satellite state estimation plays a fundamental role in orbital navigation, tracking, and autonomous space operations. Accurate estimation remains challenging due to uncertainties in process and measurement noise, which may degrade the performance of conventional Kalman filtering techniques. This paper presents a Neural-enhanced micro-Kalman filter ($\mu$KF) for satellite tracking based on an information-form state estimation framework. Starting from a linearized state-space model of orbital dynamics, a lightweight neural scaling mechanism is introduced to adapt the process and measurement noise covariances online while preserving the underlying Bayesian filtering structure. The proposed estimator is formulated within the information-form $\mu$KF framework and evaluated through numerical simulations using a linear Gaussian satellite tracking model. Its performance is compared with the classical Kalman filter (KF), the extended Kalman filter (EKF), the unscented Kalman filter (UKF), and an adaptive Kalman filter under identical operating conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Neural-$\mu$KF accurately tracks the satellite states with consistently low mean square estimation errors (MSEE). Furthermore, the proposed method achieves estimation performance comparable to, and for selected states slightly better than, the baseline Kalman filter while retaining the computational advantages of the information-form formulation. These results demonstrate that integrating lightweight neural covariance adaptation into the $\mu$KF provides an effective and flexible framework for satellite state estimation.

Purpose: To compare detuning performance and evaluate the power requirements of optical detuning methods, and to demonstrate the feasibility of an optically detuned four-channel receive array. Methods: Four optical detuning methods were compared in simulations, bench tests, and phantom measurements at 3T against conventional galvanic detuning. Passive detuning was also tested as an additional wireless detuning option. Optical power requirements for the detuning networks were investigated, and a flexible, optically detuned 4-channel shielded-loop resonator (SLR) array was constructed and tested in vivo. Results: A photodiode-PIN diode combination exhibited the highest unloaded Q (68.6) and Q ratio (1.9), with detuning performance and signal-to-noise ratio comparable to that of galvanic detuning at an optical power of 10 mW. Using this detuning strategy, in vivo images of the knee and brain were successfully acquired with a 4-channel flexible array. Conclusion: Optical detuning is a practical alternative to conventional galvanic detuning in flexible SLR arrays. With advances in optical signal and power transmission, optimizing optical detuning while meeting manageable power requirements is an important step toward fully optical receive-coil arrays. This study provides a baseline for the total optical power required for active detuning in such optical coil systems.

This paper proposes a novel cyclic-prefixed single-carrier transmission scheme that amalgamate a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) with spatial modulation in the frequency-selective fading channel. The discrete-input continuous-output memoryless channel's~(DCMC) capacities of the proposed schemes are formulated, while their gradients with respect to the RIS phase shifts are derived in the closed form. Then, the gradients are used for iteratively and efficiently optimizing the proposed RIS-aided schemes with the aid of the gradient-ascent algorithm. Our performance results demonstrate that the proposed iterative algorithm enhances the DCMC capacity of the schemes, while outperforming the conventional RIS benchmarks. Moreover, the convergence behavior and sensitivity in the proposed iterative algorithm are analyzed.

Fluid reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (FRIS) have recently emerged as a promising technology for enhancing wireless link reliability through spatial decorrelation. However, their performance analysis remains challenging due to the sum-product structure of the cascaded channel. This letter develops a rigorous analytical framework for FRIS-assisted wireless systems over arbitrarily correlated Nakagami-$m$ fading channels. Specifically, we introduce a physically consistent correlation model for Nakagami-$m$ fading and derive tractable statistical characterizations for the cascaded channel. These results lead to rigorous lower bounds for the outage probability (OP), with a simplified expression also obtained for the independent and identically distributed case. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first strict OP lower bounds reported for an FRIS-aided wireless system under arbitrarily correlated Nakagami-$m$ fading. CLT- and Gamma-based approximations are included as benchmark methods. Notably, the numerical results show that the proposed OP bound not only provides rigorous performance guarantees but also yields a noticeably tighter OP characterization than the CLT approximation in the high-SNR regime.

Audio-Visual speech recognition systems often degrade in real-world scenarios due to signal corruption and distribution shifts. To address this, we propose a unified uncertainty-modeling framework, namely the uncertainty-aware Bayesian gating network (UBG-Net). UBG-Net features a Modality Uncertainty-aware Bayesian Fusion (MUBF) mechanism that injects signal-level aleatoric uncertainty into a Bayesian network to model epistemic uncertainty, thereby ensuring robust fusion of pre-trained backbone features. For inference, we introduce Distribution Uncertainty-aware Hierarchical Voting (DUHV) to select transcripts from Monte Carlo samples, prioritizing frequency and using inference scores in case of a tie. Experiments on the AVCocktail and LRS2 datasets demonstrate the overall superiority of UBG-Net compared to SOTA baselines. Ablation studies confirm that MUBF and DUHV effectively filter noise, enhancing fusion and decoding robustness.

Variable-speed pumped storage hydropower (VS-PSH) must honor short-block dispatch commitments while limiting the operational degradation that intensified regulation duty inflicts on its components. When a single controller pursues both aims at once, every tracking gain is paid for in degradation, a conflict that persists even under full model knowledge and look-ahead. This paper proposes a two-layer control architecture that separates the guaranteed commitment from the bounded learning. A deterministic feedforward-PI gate controller, auditable and certifiable for grid-connected operation, secures average power delivery over each five-minute block, while a residual reinforcement learning policy adjusts only the rotor speed within a fixed bound the gate loop can always absorb, so the worst-case command is bounded by construction. The speed policy tracks a demand-dependent best-efficiency-point reference and is trained against an operation-degradation index that combines off-best-efficiency hydraulic loss with power and actuation variation into one physically interpretable signal. Across normal and stressed dispatch, the proposed policy lowers best-efficiency-point tracking error by roughly 96\% relative to a fixed-speed baseline and cuts total degradation by up to about 56\% under the most demanding dispatch. It matches or slightly exceeds a full-information model-based optimizer in efficiency while preserving substantially tighter block tracking.

Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is directly implementable on nonlinear systems because its online update requires only forward rollouts of the dynamics, not gradients, linearizations, or convex optimization. However, this algorithmic flexibility does not by itself provide a closed-loop stability certificate. This paper establishes such a certificate through a stability-inheritance argument. We assume that there exists a deterministic nonlinear MPC policy whose disturbance-free closed loop is certified by a Control Lyapunov Function terminal cost and a contraction metric, and we show that finite-sample MPPI inherits the nominal contraction when its sampling-based update approximates this reference policy with sufficient accuracy. The approximation error decomposes into a finite-temperature bias floor and a Monte Carlo term that vanishes at the inverse square-root rate in the sample count. Under an explicit small-gain condition, the resulting MPPI closed loop satisfies a finite-horizon, high-probability localized mean practical stability bound with residual floors due to MPPI approximation error, Gaussian process noise, and bad sampling events. The paper also gives an ISS-type restatement and a finite-horizon design procedure for choosing the localization set, temperature, and sample count.

Sampling-based model predictive control methods handle nonlinear dynamics and complex cost landscapes through Monte Carlo rollouts, yet typically employ fixed constraint penalties that do not adapt to model-plant mismatch. This paper proposes Residual-Conservative Model Predictive Path Integral Control (RC-MPPI), a sampling-based MPC framework that modulates safety conservatism online using the prediction-execution residual. RC-MPPI combines three coupled mechanisms: residual-dependent constraint tightening, adaptive safety-cost shaping, and residual-adaptive sampling modulation through exploration contraction and temperature relaxation. The temperature adaptation reflects a key insight: when the model is inaccurate, rollout cost evaluations become unreliable, and increasing temperature reduces overcommitment to apparent cost rankings. Under Lipschitz dynamics and sub-Gaussian disturbances, we derive probabilistic bounds on constraint violation and show that the joint effect of the adaptive mechanisms reduces violation probability as the residual grows. A rollout-cost uncertainty analysis further shows that model-plant mismatch perturbs MPPI importance weights in proportion to residual magnitude and inversely with temperature, providing theoretical justification for residual-adaptive temperature relaxation. Simulations on an LTI point-mass system and a planar 2R manipulator show improved safety margin, success rate, and control efficiency compared with vanilla MPPI under significant model-plant mismatch.

The rapid growth of artificial intelligence workloads is increasing the scale and concentration of data center demand, creating new concerns for power system resilience under disruptive events. This paper extends a validated multi-time-step DC optimal power flow framework to evaluate the impact of aggregated data center demand on contingency-induced unserved energy. Using an IEEE 30-bus system with flexible resources, we replace a conventional load at a contingency-exposed bus with an energy-matched constant data center load and examine two capacity-growth levels under generator derating, transmission line derating, and coupled derating. The results show that data center capacity growth substantially increases both system-level and data-center-bus unserved energy under transmission-constrained contingencies. Under coupled derating, the high-growth case increases total unserved energy from 3.203 MWh in the energy-matched case to 22.891 MWh. A supplementary energy-matched coincident-demand case further increases total unserved energy by 34.4%, indicating that temporally concentrated data center demand can amplify resilience impacts even without increasing total energy consumption.

This paper investigates the subspace consensus problem of matrix-weighted multi-agent networks, where each agent possesses a vector-valued state in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ and interactions between neighboring agents are characterized by matrix-valued edge weights. Besides all dimensions of the agent states achieve full-state consensus, many practical applications appeal that agents are required to agree only on certain dimensions while maintaining desired relative configurations in the remaining ones. To address this gap, we introduce the concept of subspace consensus. A matrix-weighted network is said to achieve subspace consensus on a subspace $\mathbb{V}\subseteq\mathbb{R}^{d}$ if the projection of the agents' state differences onto $\mathbb{V}$ asymptotically converges to zero. This definition renders the traditional consensus as a special case when $\mathbb{V}=\mathbb{R}^{d}$. From an algebraic perspective, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for subspace consensus by analyzing the interplay between the null spaces of edge weights. From a topological perspective, we present sufficient conditions characterized by $\mathbb{V}$-connectivity and the existence of a $\mathbb{V}$-spanning tree, as well as necessary conditions based on graph cuts. Furthermore, we provide refined necessary and sufficient conditions specifically for tree networks. This work uncovers a fundamental capability inherent to matrix-weighted networks and establishes a systematic framework for analyzing agreement behaviors on prescribed subspaces.

This paper addresses observer-based target control for linear time-delay systems subject to simultaneous, mismatched input and output latencies. While full-state regulation is often conservative and computationally intensive, practical engineering objectives typically require controlling only specific linear combinations of states, or target outputs. To overcome the challenges posed by these asymmetric, dual-channel delays, we propose a reduced-order modeling framework inspired by the structural philosophy of Fernando and Darouach \cite{Fernando2025}. By projecting the high-dimensional plant dynamics onto the row space of the target output matrix $F_o$, the controller focuses strictly on the lower-dimensional target subspace. Based on this projection, an observer-based control scheme is developed to ensure precise target stabilization despite the simultaneous, mismatched input, state, and output latencies.

Mobile C-arm cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) has been widely used for real-time intraoperative 3D imaging. However, current practice often mechanically applies the fan-beam CT criterion of "180° plus fan angle" in pursuit of "data completeness" in reconstruction. This review argues that, under the single circular trajectory of three-dimensional cone-beam geometry, complete data are mathematically unattainable; moreover, blindly increasing sampling may exacerbate the trade-off among intraoperative image quality (Q), imaging time (T), and radiation dose (D). Against this background, this review reframes the evaluation of intraoperative CBCT around "data sufficiency" rather than "data completeness." This perspective moves beyond the excessive pursuit of absolute mathematical and analytic accuracy, and instead emphasizes task-specific minimum image-quality thresholds required for clinical decision-making. By synthesizing evidence from multiple clinical scenarios, this review suggests that approximation errors can be acceptable when clinical decision-making requirements are satisfied, thereby achieving a Q-T-D balance.

Industrial sealing and dispensing cells often reuse a pressure chain, nozzle, substrate path, and vision interface across product recipes. For a narrow bead recipe, however, a calibrated static pressure can remain correct while small corrective moves are absorbed by actuator deadband; delivered pressure changes only after a direction- and history-dependent threshold is crossed. Commissioning is defined here as the target setup and retuning interval after such a recipe change. A physical gluing and dispensing cell provides pressure-to-width calibration, a fixed probing sequence, signal-interface limits, residual scales, and actuator bounds. The controller comparison is then run on an anonymized digital twin calibrated from those measurements. The actuator-deadband-aware Koopman model predictive controller (AK-MPC) initializes from probe-conditioned memory (PCM) that links the pressure setpoint to probe-inferred actuator behavior, a predictor, a controller prior, and a fallback filter. During commissioning, a sixteen-move probe selects a nearby historical case, fits the current pressure-width relation, updates a small local dynamic correction, and supplies a feasible receding-horizon pressure policy. In the main \(1.00\) mm benchmark, where delivered-pressure loss is visible in the probe, AK-MPC reaches 0.0487 mm tracking mean absolute error (MAE) over 60 paired cases; the calibration-only inverse, adaptive proportional-integral, online recursive-least-squares ARX, and probe-fitted ARX controllers range from 0.2492 to 0.3956 mm. This large gap reflects the full constrained Koopman-MPC and online-correction workflow. The isolated PCM contribution is measured by ablation: removing PCM raises the error to 0.0655 mm. In this regime, a short actuator characterization makes historical runs useful before much target data are available.

To achieve the desired coverage and capacity levels, future terahertz (THz) wireless systems are envisioned to utilize extremely large antenna arrays. At THz frequencies, the combination of short wavelengths and large array apertures often makes many of the conventional far-field assumptions invalid in practice. As a result, many UEs operate in the radiative near-field zone, where novel near-field beam synthesis methods become viable. This paper studies phase-only Bessel-like near-field beam configurations for downlink THz multiple-input multiple-output links under imperfect UE location knowledge. We first formulate a spectral efficiency maximization problem with respect to the "Bessel cone angle''. We then derive low-complexity closed-form approximations for the optimal Bessel beam configuration for: (i)deterministic UE location; (ii)Gaussian and (iii)uniform error in the UE location. Finally, through extensive simulations across multiple signal frequencies, UE locations, and array sizes, we show that our proposed simple closed-form approximations closely match (under 0.1% difference) the best performance achieved via exhaustive search, while simultaneously reducing the configuration complexity down to as low as O(1).

Subsampling significantly reduces the number of measurements, thereby streamlining data processing and transfer overhead, and shortening acquisition time across diverse real-world applications. The recently introduced Active Deep Probabilistic Subsampling (A-DPS) approach jointly optimizes both the subsampling pattern and the downstream task model, enabling instance- and subject-specific sampling trajectories and effective adaptation to new data at inference time. However, this approach does not fully leverage valuable dataset priors and relies on top-1 sampling, which can impede the optimization process. Herein, we enhance A-DPS by integrating a deterministic (fixed) prior-informed sampling pattern derived from the training dataset, along with group-based sampling via top-k sampling, to achieve more robust optimization, method we call Prior-aware and context-guided Group-based Active DPS (PGA-DPS). We also provide a theoretical analysis supporting improved optimization via group sampling, and validate this with empirical results. We evaluated PGA-DPS on three tasks: classification, image reconstruction, and segmentation, using the MNIST, CIFAR-10, fastMRI knee, and hyperspectral AeroRIT datasets, respectively. In every case, PGA-DPS outperformed A-DPS, DPS, and all other sampling methods.

Recent full-duplex spoken dialogue models have demonstrated compelling progress toward human-like interaction, enabling agents to respond with low latency, produce backchannels, and handle user barge-ins. Yet these improvements in conversational dynamics often come with weaker reasoning and instruction-following abilities, revealing a potential tension between interactive dynamics and intelligence capability. In this paper, we argue that such an intelligence--dynamics trade-off is not fundamental: conversational dynamics can instead be learned as a separate real-time decision policy from human dialogue data. To this end, we propose DuplexPO, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that decouples when to speak from what to say. It preserves the semantic response capability of an instruction-tuned assistant, while optimizing its temporal interaction behavior over selected high-impact windows from long human conversations. To quantitatively optimize these dynamics, we formulate the Factorized Conversational Dynamics Reward (FCDR) to enable fine-grained temporal credit assignment for turn initiation, backchanneling, yielding, and regularized participation. The policy is then optimized with a GRPO-style objective. Experiments show that DuplexPO substantially improves full-duplex behaviors, including timely backchannels, smooth turn-taking, and barge-in handling, while maintaining strong reasoning and instruction-following performance. Moreover, improvements in dynamics-oriented metrics are reflected in better user experience, suggesting that optimizing conversational timing as a standalone objective can promote more natural full-duplex interaction.

Background: Automated 3D segmentation of muscles and adipose tissue from CT is vital for body composition analysis, but multi-source data heterogeneity and high CPU memory demands hinder clinical deployment. Methods: We propose a coarse-to-fine hierarchical framework to segment ten tissue structures. Efficiency is optimized using Dynamic Spacing and Anisotropic Patching, a Group Inference mechanism for low-memory sliding-window processing, and Topology-Aware Asymmetric Resampling for fast post-processing. Results: The framework was trained on 1,558 CT volumes from seven public and two private datasets, and evaluated on an independent test cohort (N=105), per-structure Dice coefficients ranged from 0.924 to 0.982. Eight major structures met the +-10% relative error clinical acceptance limit. On a 12-core CPU workstation, the GPU-free pipeline averaged 44.5 seconds per volume with 4.73 GB peak memory. Conclusion: This framework balances accuracy and efficiency, enabling robust, large-scale body composition analysis on standard CPU workstations.

Estimating the region of attraction (RoA) of nonlinear systems is fundamental for assessing closed-loop stability and ensuring safe operation. While Lyapunov-based approaches provide certified stability guarantees, they often yield conservative inner approximations of the RoA. This paper combines a certified Lyapunov-based positively invariant set with a predecessor-based implicit representation to compute a significantly less conservative inner approximation of the RoA while preserving formal stability guarantees. In addition, the robust positive invariance of the initial certified Lyapunov-based invariant set is analyzed under bounded additive input disturbances, providing formal robustness guarantees. The proposed methodology is demonstrated on a nonlinear two-wheeled inverted pendulum stabilized by a saturated linear quadratic regulator. The resulting RoA approximation is compared with the initial Lyapunov-certified invariant set and validated through Monte Carlo simulations and hardware experiments, showing a substantially enlarged certified operating region that matches the empirical closed-loop behavior. These results demonstrate the practical applicability of combining certified Lyapunov analysis with predecessor-based set propagation for RoA approximation and robustness assessment of nonlinear systems.

Power distribution system feeder models (e.g., IEEE 33-bus system, IEEE 13-bus system, etc.) are cornerstones for conducting power distribution system studies. As real-world feeder models are hard to acquire due to energy security concerns, generating high-quality synthetic feeders becomes an important alternative to satisfy the fast-growing and diversified needs of power system researchers and engineers. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based synthetic feeder generation framework that can achieve end-to-end generation from natural language specifications to physically consistent feeder models. First, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is performed on a dataset created following physical laws to empower the LLM with syntactic understanding of complex feeder structures. Second, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a specially-designed multi-stage gated reward function is introduced to better align the generation results with user intent and physical constraints. Third, a dual-agent architecture is deployed to refine and evaluate the generated feeders. Specifically, a refinement agent calibrates the feeder model parameters referring to the industrial feeder design standards, while a judge agent provides quality assessments. Case studies demonstrate that the proposed framework generates customizable feeders with valid formats, physical consistency and high engineering applicability.

High-quality system measurement data is critical for power distribution system operation. As deep generative models (e.g., GAN, Diffusion, etc.) have been widely studied to solve the missing data restoration problem to enhance the data quality, their results may look "realistic" but not sufficiently "accurate" due to lacking physical guarantees. To address this limitation, a two-stage physics-guided framework, Flow-PIN, is proposed in this paper for system-wide multivariate profile inpainting. The first stage employs a conditional flow matching model, conditioned on topological and correlation graphs, to generate candidate values. A physical penalty is integrated into the loss function to constrain the generative vector field based on grid physical laws. The second stage introduces a topology-aware power-flow-guided refiner that utilizes Laplacian positional encoding to inject topology information into node embeddings. By coupling alternating current power flow equations with a differentiable correlation alignment mechanism, this refiner further corrects numerical deviations. Evaluations on an active distribution network dataset benchmark the proposed framework against ten representative baselines. The results show that Flow-PIN achieves high-fidelity profile inpainting across three dimensions: maximizing numerical accuracy, capturing temporal fluctuation, and preserving spatial topological correlations.

The certainty equivalence (CE) principle underpins a wide range of control architectures by enabling the separation of estimation and control design. While this property holds for linear systems, its validity in nonlinear settings remains limited and often implicitly assumed. This paper revisits CE from a nonlinear perspective, showing that estimated states induce an intrinsic coupling between estimation and tracking dynamics. By analyzing the closed-loop system in tracking-error coordinates, we demonstrate that nonlinear state dependence gives rise to higher-order interaction terms during aggressive transients. Motivated by this limitation, we propose an estimation-aware (EA) control paradigm that incorporates estimation quality into the feedback law to isolate estimation-induced loops. The formulation remains filtering-agnostic while preserving general applicability to smooth, underactuated nonlinear systems. We derive analytical conditions guaranteeing bounded tracking under uncertainty, validating the framework under high-fidelity quadrotor flight simulation along complex 3D trajectories at speeds up to 57.6 km/h. Frequency-domain evaluations demonstrate that the EA law extends tracking bandwidth by 39% and improves stability margins by up to 55%, effectively mitigating severe cross-couplings to offer a robust alternative to classical CE-based designs.

High-frequency communications strongly depend on the line-of-sight (LoS) path, and obstacle blockage can severely degrade the received signal power and achievable rate. Near-field Airy beams with curved trajectories can circumvent obstacles, offering a promising way to alleviate blockage. However, since an Airy beam carries most useful energy along a single curved trajectory, existing Airy beamforming methods are highly sensitive to estimation errors of transmitter-obstacle-receiver geometry. That is to say, even a small error in the estimated geometry may cause the mismatched Airy trajectory, leading to severe performance loss. To address this problem, we propose a multi-Airy beamforming scheme for blockage-robust near-field communications. Specifically, we first reveal and analyze the sensitivity mechanism of single-Airy beamforming. This mechanism motivates us to extend the single-Airy generation method to a coordinated multi-Airy generation method by deriving the phase offsets required to coherently combine multiple Airy beams at the target user. Based on this coordinated generation method, we partition the transmit array into multiple sub-arrays and configure a tailored Airy beam for each sub-array, so that the resulting Airy beams formed by multiple curved trajectories can be coherently combined at the target user. Simulation results verify the sensitivity of single-Airy beamforming and the robustness of multi-Airy beamforming under estimation errors of transmitter-obstacle-receiver geometry. Moreover, the proposed scheme achieves higher achievable rates than single-Airy beamforming in blocked scenarios without geometry estimation errors.

UAV-mounted reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are a promising enabler for 6G networks, offering dynamic control of wireless propagation for coverage enhancement, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), and localization. By exploiting UAV mobility, RIS can maintain favorable line-of-sight links, improving channel quality in dynamic environments. However, UAV positioning uncertainties introduce channel distortions that degrade RIS phase alignment and coherent combining. This work develops a GUM-based uncertainty propagation framework for UAV-mounted RIS channels, mapping UAV position uncertainty through the geometric Tx-RIS-Rx model into the complex cascaded channel. We derive a closed-form stochastic propagation model capturing nonlinear phase uncertainty effects and quantify their impact on channel coherence. The results show that phase uncertainty induces exponential coherence loss, dominating performance degradation. To characterize this transition, we introduce a performance-driven coherence threshold (PCT) that defines the boundary where incoherent combining results in a predetermined performance loss. Results based on analytical scaling laws and Monte Carlo simulations confirm the tightness of the PCT in accurately capturing the coherence transition. This validated threshold is then leveraged to derive optimal UAV-mounted RIS placement, revealing that realistic positioning conditions significantly deviate from the conventional RIS intuition, which typically favors placement close to either the transmitter or receiver.

Continuous fluid antenna systems (CFASs) represent an upper bound on the spatial diversity performance of fluid antenna systems (FASs), achieved when antennas may be positioned anywhere within a defined spatial region. This article examines the fundamental relationships governing CFAS performance. The focus is on the probability that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) exceeds a prescribed high threshold, termed the high SNR probability (HSP). This is among the few FAS performance metrics that admit the derivation of closed-form expressions. Following a survey of recent analytical advances in FAS performance limits, a dimensional scaling law derived for the HSP of a single-user, single-antenna CFAS is examined. This law is then applied to the per-user high signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) probability of a two-antenna, two-user CFAS employing minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) combining. For both scenarios, performance gains are shown to increase consistently with both dimensionality and region size. Remarkably, the scaling law remains accurate in the two-user case, showing that, in both scenarios, the influence of additional dimensions is dominated by the CFAS size and considered threshold. Moreover, the per-user high SINR probability of the two-user system exceeds the single-user HSP, despite the addition of inter-user interference.

Wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs) are a key enabler for sustainable Internet of Things (IoT) systems, yet their practical performance is constrained by inefficient wireless energy transfer, limited spatial adaptability, and fragile uplink connectivity in blockage-prone and dynamic environments. Emerging reconfigurable antenna technologies, including pinching antenna systems (PASSs), fluid antenna systems (FASs), movable antennas (MAs), and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), provide new opportunities to overcome these limitations, but have mostly been studied separately. In this article, we propose a unified architecture for fully reconfigurable WPCNs by jointly integrating PASS-enabled power beacons, FAS-based IoT devices, MA-assisted base stations, and RIS-aided propagation environments. The proposed framework enables end-to-end reconfigurability across downlink energy transfer, device-side spatial adaptation, base-station reception, and uplink information transmission. We further discuss the integration motivation, system architecture, design and optimization framework, illustrative performance evaluation, implementation tradeoffs, and major practical challenges. This article provides a new perspective for designing next-generation fully reconfigurable WPCNs.

Sparse vector transmission (SVT) has emerged as a promising technique for ultra-reliable low-latency short-packet communications. However, existing SVT schemes typically assume negligible phase noise (PN), an assumption that rarely holds in practical wireless systems. In this paper, a dual-mapping sparse vector coding (DM-SVC) scheme is proposed for short-packet communications subject to PN. In DM-SVC, pilot symbols are mapped onto multiple non-zero blocks and data symbols onto isolated non-zero elements within a single sparse vector, thereby enabling pilot-data separation through distinct sparsity patterns rather than explicit resource partitioning. Moreover, the indices of pilot blocks convey additional information bits, further improving spectral efficiency. A basis expansion model is adopted to represent the PN process, substantially reducing the number of parameters to be estimated. Furthermore, an iterative joint PN estimation and data decoding algorithm is developed, where pilot block indices are first detected exploiting block-sparse priors, after which PN estimation and data decoding proceed iteratively. Simulation results show that DM-SVC could achieve block error rate performance close to that of perfect PN compensation, while offering improved spectral efficiency and reduced codebook storage overhead compared to state-of-the-art SVT schemes.

Semantic and terahertz (THz)-band communications are algorithmic and spectral enablers of future wireless networks. This work investigates deep learning-based semantic communication (DeepSC) over THz channels. We show that DeepSC models trained solely under additive white Gaussian noise generalize well to the tested THz block- and fast-fading channels when receiver-side compensation is applied. To enable fully data-driven reception, we propose a lightweight neural detector that does not require channel state information (CSI). At 0.3 THz, DeepSC outperforms a throughput-matched traditional coded communication system baseline over 0-12 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), achieving more than 50 percentage-point higher Bilingual Evaluation Understudy unigram (BLEU-1) score. The proposed pilot-free detector outperforms minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalization with both perfect and imperfect CSI and remains robust to frequency offsets up to 50 MHz, highlighting the resilience of semantic communication to THz channel impairments.

5G New Radio (NR) Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTNs) extend cellular connectivity through Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) satellite constellations while enabling the reuse of downlink NR Positioning Reference Signals (PRS) to provide Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) services alongside broadband communications. However, the large inter-satellite differential propagation delays inherent to NTN geometry may cause PRS transmissions from non-serving satellites to overlap with the serving-satellite data stream. This paper analyzes this coexistence by deriving a statistical model for the slant-range distribution over the visible spherical cap and extending it to dual-shell constellations through a mixture formulation, yielding a closed-form cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the differential delay. The model is validated using a 10-day orbit simulation representative of a dual-shell European NTN constellation. Detection limits of non-serving satellite PRS under interference from the serving-satellite data stream are characterized in terms of the effective carrier-to-noise density ratio. The impact of periodic PRS transmissions on the uncoded bit error rate (BER) is also evaluated for standardized NR Frequency Range 1 (FR1) and Frequency Range 2 (FR2) configurations. Monte Carlo simulations show that the probability of simultaneous multi-PRS overlap remains below a few percent, depending on PRS duration and repetition period, while PRS detection remains feasible despite data interference. When the PRS is received about 25 dB below the data signal, its impact on uncoded BER is negligible over a wide range of repetition periods, whereas BER degradation increases with PRS duty cycle. These results demonstrate that NR-PRS-based PNT can coexist with broadband downlink in NTN under appropriate PRS periodicity design.

Generating signals on graphs requires permutation-equivariant models that exhibit stability with respect to relative structural perturbations. While favorable stability properties of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been well documented, it is unclear how structural errors propagate through the dynamics of continuous generative flow models that are gaining traction for graph signal generation. In this paper, we analyze continuous normalized flow models parameterized by GNNs and show that permutation equivariance is preserved for both the resulting continuous-time ordinary differential equations and their discrete numerical approximations used as graph signal samplers. Our primary contribution is to derive explicit stability bounds on the generated probability distributions, which quantify how relative graph perturbations affect the final sampled signals. Motivated by these theoretical bounds, we introduce a stability-promoting regularized flow matching strategy that actively penalizes the spatial Lipschitz constant of the vector field during model training. Experiments using synthetic smooth signals on stochastic block model graphs and real-world fMRI signals on brain connectomes demonstrate that this bound-oriented approach yields generative models that are more robust to structural noise, without sacrificing output quality.

Virtualized radio access networks (vRAN) run the compute-intensive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) baseband as software on shared servers, which makes energy efficiency (EE) a primary design objective. Distributed MIMO vRAN consumes power across virtualized distributed unit (vDU) baseband, fronthaul transport, and per-radio-unit operation. We build a power model that resolves these three components. We then develop a framework that jointly selects modulation, transmission rank, and per-subcarrier power to maximize system EE. Exponential effective SNR mapping induces a convex per-subcarrier power constraint, which yields a convex power minimization problem with a closed-form waterfilling-like solution. We show that radio frequency-only models underestimate the spectral efficiency range where single-input multiple-output (SIMO) transmission saves power, and our power model extends this range by 24%. We further extend the framework to a traffic-aware setting with realistic user trajectories from the multi-agent transport simulator. We propose a traffic-aware strategy that switches each radio unit among MIMO, SIMO, and sleep modes based on demand. Simulation results over 3GPP NR compliant fading channels show that, after a one-time offline calibration, the framework predicts link performance without further link-level simulation. The proposed framework achieves higher average EE than a traffic-agnostic always-on MIMO baseline, while maintaining comparable throughput at peak hours.

The whole-system impedance model has proven a powerful tool for assessing the small-signal stability of multi-inverter power systems; however, its application is limited to a small range around a steady-state operating point due to the inherent assumptions of time invariance and linearisation. In this paper, a dedicated physics-informed neural network (PINN) for small-signal stability analysis in high-dimensional multi-inverter power systems is developed. The PINN is trained with step-response data produced from limited sets of system electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulations, and the trained model can predict the poles and residues of the whole-system impedance/admittance model, i.e., the transfer functions, across the full operating space. Such a PINN offers unique insights into system stability that surpass what conventional analytical methods or EMT simulations can achieve. By characterising how the impedance model evolves with power flow variations, it predicts the dynamic behaviour of the time-varying system and reveals oscillation risks that may emerge while identifying their root causes. It also provides direct visualisation of the possible range of oscillatory modes under a given power flow condition, enabling an optimal generation distribution while maintaining safe operation of the system. The proposed PINN is fully validated on a 2-IBR system and a 4-IBR system, with its application details presented.

Neural audio codecs (NACs) enable efficient audio compression and have achieved success in downstream tasks such as speech synthesis. However, their discrete representations consistently underperform traditional spectral features in automatic speaker verification (ASV). We empirically demonstrate that speaker cues are implicitly preserved in discrete tokens but remain underutilized by conventional ASV training paradigms. To address this, we propose a Cross-Feature Knowledge Distillation (CFKD) framework. By guiding the codec-based student to mimic the embedding space of a strong Fbank-based teacher, CFKD provides structured supervision for effective utilization of speaker information in tokens. Experiments on the VoxCeleb benchmarks show that CFKD substantially improves the ASV performance of codec-based systems, allowing them to approach the accuracy of Fbank-based teacher models and highlighting the potential of discrete audio tokens for diverse speech tasks.

Accurate state-of-charge (SOC) estimation remains a fundamental challenge in lithium-ion battery management systems because battery dynamics are highly nonlinear, operating-condition dependent, and sensitive to parameter variations caused by aging and temperature. Conventional model-based estimators, such as equivalent circuit model (ECM) and Kalman-filter-based approaches, rely heavily on repeated parameter identification and accurate electrochemical modeling, whereas purely data-driven methods often sacrifice physical interpretability. This work proposes a Koopman-theoretic, data-driven framework for SOC estimation using Dynamic Mode Decomposition with control (DMDc) combined with Hankel time-delay embedding. Instead of explicitly identifying ECM parameters, the proposed approach reconstructs a lifted dynamical state space directly from measured terminal voltage and current obtained through Hybrid Pulse Power Characterization (HPPC) testing. Spectral decomposition of the identified DMDc operator reveals intrinsic battery dynamics in terms of Koopman modes and eigenvalues. The SOC dynamics naturally emerge as the slowest marginally stable mode whose eigenvalue lies closest to the unit circle, consistent with the integrator-type behavior of charge conservation. The corresponding modal coordinate is subsequently utilized as an SOC-sensitive observable.

Recent advances in multi-band wireless communication systems have driven the increasing need for dual-band bandpass filters. These types of filters are capable of isolating a small section of the frequency spectrum within a broader spectrum. Over the years, coplanar waveguide, microstrip, slotline, stripline, and other planar transmission line technologies have been widely employed in the design of microwave circuits and systems. This work employs a Folded-Arms Square Open-Loop Resonator (FASOLR) microstrip planar structure, designed and simulated using PathWave Advanced Design System (ADS). A third order (three-pole) single bandpass filter is transformed into a sixth order (six-pole) dual-band bandpass filter. The proposed six-pole dual-band bandpass filter is centred at 2.3 GHz, with a fractional bandwidth of 7% and produces two passbands centred at approximately 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz. The design is implemented on a commercially available Rogers RT/Duroid 6010LM substrate with a dielectric constant of 10.7, a loss tangent of 0.0023, a substrate thickness of 1.27 mm, and 35 micro meter copper cladding on both sides. The overall filter component has a compact footprint of 30.56 mm by 20.56 mm. The design is validated through comparison of circuit-level and electromagnetic (EM) simulation results, which show good agreement. The EM simulation responses indicate a return loss better than 10 dB on the first band and better than 19 dB on the second, and an insertion loss better than 1.5 dB, demonstrating its suitability for WiMAX applications.

Process industries rely on time-series forecasting and soft sensing to estimate quality variables that are hard to measure online. Labeled data are scarce, operating regimes change frequently, and retraining models or rebuilding alignment pipelines for each scenario is costly. Such settings often provide variable tables and process documents that record variable names, units, physical meanings, and process roles. However, standard time-series backbones usually treat inputs as anonymous numerical columns. Existing text-enhanced methods also rarely make the semantic-logical relations between input variables and the prediction target available to the model within each numerical window. To address this problem, this article proposes Task-Semantic Field Factorization (TSF), a large language model (LLM)-guided framework. TSF builds a task-semantic field from task protocols and variable documents before training and uses the LLM only for offline semantic construction. Online training and inference remain with conventional time-series backbones. During training and inference, the current numerical window activates variable semantics, so semantic information participates in each prediction and supports adaptation to different prediction targets and operating shifts. On multiple complex industrial forecasting and soft-sensing tasks, TSF reduces MAE by 6.4\% on average in improved settings, with the largest reduction reaching 25.5\%. It adds only about 1.8--3.0k parameters, with less than 0.008 ms/step of additional online inference overhead. These results show that TSF turns existing process documents into measurable forecasting gains across backbones and semantic generators while remaining lightweight for deployment.

Process industries have accumulated validated specialist models, yet sensor drift, feedstock variation, and regime switching cause these models to degrade systematically in new scenarios. Collecting new labeled data and retraining is costly, while continuing with the original model incurs persistent bias. Existing adaptation methods require modifying model parameters with sufficient labeled data, making rapid response on deployed systems difficult. Using LLMs as direct predictors risks hallucinations and uncontrollable outputs. Such predictors also cannot incorporate unstructured scenario knowledge from the field. To address these limitations, this article proposes Reasoning-Driven Open Adaptation for Specialist Models (ROAM), a framework that uses LLM world knowledge and reasoning to adapt frozen specialist models to unseen scenarios without retraining. ROAM confines all corrections to a low-dimensional, semantically interpretable latent space. LLM-generated scenario judgments and online observations are fused under a unified probabilistic framework. A risk-constrained mechanism suppresses corrections under unreliable LLM evidence or abrupt scenario shifts and falls back to the original frozen model when evidence is insufficient. Experiments on a mineral thickening process and the public IndPenSim penicillin fermentation dataset show that ROAM reduces MAE by over 20\% in major shift settings such as hidden shifts with only 839 additional parameters and under 0.02\,ms per-step overhead. These results indicate that LLM reasoning can be turned into a conservative adaptation signal for industrial models already in service.

Formal robustness certificates for embedded neural-interface models can pass while task accuracy collapses: at perturbation budget e=0.25, EEGNet classification accuracy drops by 25.7% under projected-gradient attack while the Lipschitz-style certificate remains valid for all 9 tested subjects. We argue that this gap between mathematical certification and operational safety is one instance of a broader alignment failure in neural interfaces, where training objectives diverge from user welfare. We propose a unified empirical audit framework organized around three such failures: verification insufficiency, in which certificates pass while task behavior degrades; proxy-fidelity divergence, in which task-optimized representations damage neural signal structure (a time-domain auxiliary objective reduces reconstruction MSE by 0.1132 while worsening spectral log-MSE); and latent information exfiltration, in which public-task embeddings retain private attributes (subject identity recoverable at 48.1% versus 6.7% chance). We instantiate the framework on BCI Competition IV 2a and SEED-IV using multiple deep and classical EEG decoders, official session-level validation, null controls, and paired statistical tests. The verification gap persists across EEGNet, CSP+LDA, and FBCSP+LDA, and is therefore architecture-independent. Our results establish that operational safety auditing, not certificate verification alone, is necessary for responsible neural-interface deployment.

This paper provides the first near-optimal lower bounds for one-bit compressed sensing of approximately sparse signals lying in a scaled $\ell_1$ ball, which is a commonly adopted relaxation of the exactly $k$-sparse assumption. In prior works, the best known upper bounds on uniform Euclidean error are of order $\widetilde{O}((k/m)^{1/3})$, where $m$ is the number of measurements. Under sub-Gaussian matrices, we establish nearly matching lower bounds for both the canonical one-bit compressed sensing model and the uniformly dithered model. Our argument is to first embed a small Euclidean ball into the signal set, which is straightforward for the dithered model but relies on a lifting map for the canonical model, and then construct two signals in this small ball that are separated in Euclidean distance by at least $(k/m)^{1/3}$ (up to logarithmic factor) but are indistinguishable from the binary measurements. Moreover, our argument extends to approximately sparse signals that live in a properly scaled $\ell_q$ ball $(q\in [0,1])$, yielding a lower bound $\widetilde{\Omega}((k/m)^{\frac{2-q}{2+q}})$ that smoothly bridges the cases of exact sparsity ($q=0$) and $\ell_1$ sparsity ($q=1$). Finally, we discuss the extensions of our lower bounds to sub-Weibull matrices, adversarial bit flipping, matrix recovery, and characterize the transition to the non-sparse case.

Sampling stochastic signals supported on a graph underlies many graph machine learning tasks, including recommender systems, forecasting in financial markets, and wireless network optimization. In these settings, the target signals are realizations of unknown conditional distributions. However, prevailing approaches rely mostly on intricate, application-tailored designs that often regress to a conditional mean instead of sampling from the conditional law. This paper unifies such problems as conditional graph signal generative modeling and tackles them with a single denoising diffusion framework. We learn a reverse diffusion process, parametrized by graph neural networks (GNNs), that draws graph signals conditioned directly on the graph topology and on node-feature side information. The reverse process is realized by a novel architecture, the U-Graph Neural Network (U-GNN), which generalizes the image-convolutional U-Net to graph-structured signals. The U-GNN performs multi-resolution encoder--decoder processing in which pooling and unpooling reduce to a learned node selection, expressed by nested selection matrices, and a zero-padded lifting of coarse signals back to the full node set. The graph convolutions are carried out on the original graph, with a stride that sets their hop reach, so the U-GNN bypasses explicit graph coarsening at every resolution. We demonstrate our method on two generative tasks: stock price forecasting and optimal wireless resource allocation, with extensive numerical results in both domains.

Table tennis, a dynamic, compact, and popular sport, has received significant attention as a robotics benchmark over the last decades. Most of the research has focused on the rally aspect - returning an incoming ball - requiring high-speed vision, agile motion planning, and tight closed-loop control. However, the other component of table tennis gameplay - the serve - is comparatively a quite unexplored research problem, that in fact requires pushing physics modeling and control to the extremes. Achieving competitive serves with a robot presents domain-specific challenges, such as high-spin generation from a spinless ball, precise aiming, or multi-objective optimization. In this work, we present a novel approach for generating official rule-compliant serves by combining motion primitives, Model Predictive Control, and Bayesian Optimization. Serves generated in this way offer a wide and controllable variation of spins of up to 550 rad/s, and speeds of up to 6.7 m/s, matching and even surpassing those of elite table tennis players.

Data-Enabled Predictive Control (DeePC) has recently emerged as a framework for controlling unknown systems from data. However, its performance relies on the relevance of the collected data, and as such, disturbances lead to inevitable errors. This paper addresses this problem by proposing an augmentation of DeePC using Model-Free Disturbance Observer with Online Modification (MFDOOM). The method corrects output predictions based on previous prediction errors using a dedicated continuously updated Hankel matrix. We compare our method, both theoretically and through simulation, to other recent algorithms designed for time-varying systems in the DeePC framework. It is shown that for disturbances that can be modeled as the output of an autonomous linear time-invariant system, this approach can reduce tracking error and online-update burden compared with existing online DeePC variants.

Segmenting slender curvilinear structures such as retinal vessels, cracks, and roads demands topological correctness, as even a single-pixel discontinuity can fragment a continuous network and invalidate downstream analysis. Under standard binary-mask supervision, models optimized for pixel-level overlap frequently produce topologically broken predictions. We trace this to a fundamental mismatch: pixel-wise losses distribute gradients uniformly, yet connectivity hinges on a sparse set of bottleneck pixels. These pixels are vastly outnumbered by thick structures and background, rendering their aggregate gradient contribution negligible. We term this phenomenon topological gradient starvation (TGS). To address it, we propose Widest-Path Reachability Fields (WPRF), a differentiable Max-Min reachability objective that redirects gradient flow to connectivity bottlenecks. The module is plug-and-play, backbone-agnostic, and incurs no inference overhead. WPRF implements a differentiable Max-Min objective via dynamic programming on a domain-restricted graph, coupled with a bottleneck-aware observation term that balances gradient contributions across varying structures. Compared to prior topology-aware losses that rely on post-hoc skeletonization or homology computation, WPRF directly optimizes end-to-end reachability via differentiable Max-Min algebra, enabling gradient flow to concentrate on connectivity bottlenecks without auxiliary structures. We introduce OMVIS, a new oral microvessel segmentation dataset. Experiments across nine architectures and six datasets validate the bottleneck-focused gradient routing mechanism. WPRF improves 87\% of experiments with fixed hyperparameters and achieves clDice gains of 7.2 percentage points on structurally fragile datasets.

The Internal Waves Service screens the Sentinel-1 Wave-mode archive for internal solitary waves, routing detections to experts whose adjudication time is the resource the effort exists to conserve. Because attention is the cost of error, precision leads. Its classifier was trained and reported at a one-to-one class balance, fixed before the operational rate could be known. That rate has since emerged at roughly one scene in twenty, and a balanced-test score badly overstates the precision a validator meets. A model that scores 0.794 balanced-test precision scores 0.192 in real operation: the gap is a systematic artefact of reporting at the wrong prior, invisible to the metric most work quotes. We show the mismatch to be an evaluation problem in the costume of a training one at a fixed recall, prior correction and calibration cannot move precision, and answer it with a prior-matched reporting method based on three figures: balanced-test, operational-prior, and real post-deployment, whose contrast is the honest measure. A precision-first, leakage-controlled development cycle then improves the classifier lever by lever, each promoted only against a pre-registered margin; added capacity not clearing it, calibration inert, feature aggregation the one real lift, so the honest negatives are as much a result as the gain. Holding recall at a floor of 0.80 and certifying against a sealed, single-read lockbox, the promoted model reports 0.927 precision at the operational prior; an out-of-time check confirms discrimination transfers to unseen periods while a fixed operating point does not. Prior-matched reporting, begin balanced, then move to the prior as the stream reveals it, transfers to any operational Earth-observation service bootstrapping a rare-event detector under a prior it has yet to discover.

Efficient optimization and control of photonic computing and communication systems increasingly rely on accurate surrogate models/digital twins. While data-driven models may achieve faster inference than traditional physics-based methods, they typically suffer from poor training data efficiency and limited generalizability. To address this trade-off, physics-informed data-driven modeling has emerged as a powerful hybrid paradigm. This paper presents a comparative analysis of these three modeling paradigms across three benchmark use cases: optical amplifiers, directly modulated lasers, and interferometer meshes. By evaluating model complexity, data efficiency, generalizability, and modularity, this work provides a detailed analysis of the respective trade-offs and highlights the advantages of combining physical insight with data-driven learning.

Satellite anomaly detection is essential for maintaining mission reliability and spacecraft health, yet remains challenging due to the high-dimensional, irregular, and imbalanced nature of spacecraft telemetry data. This paper presents a systematic benchmark study evaluating supervised and unsupervised anomaly detection approaches on the large-scale ESA-ADB dataset across two mission settings of varying temporal scales. Supervised models, including Multiscale Convolutional Neural Networks (Multiscale CNN), Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), and Graph Attention Networks (GAT), are compared against unsupervised methods, namely Elliptic Envelope (EE) and Empirical Cumulative Distribution Function-based Outlier Detection (ECOD). Beyond detection performance, we rigorously analyze computational runtime and scalability, which are critical for practical deployment in spacecraft operations. Results show that supervised models achieve stronger overall performance, while unsupervised methods offer competitive precision with significantly lower computational overhead. These findings underscore a fundamental trade-off between detection capacity and operational efficiency, offering practical guidance for mission engineers designing scalable satellite health monitoring systems.

Greenhouse fruit-production control aims to maximize the economic performance (fruit revenue minus operating costs) while operating within system constraints under external weather disturbances. Control methods need to balance the delayed economic benefit of fruit yield with current operating costs. For such problems, model predictive control (MPC) can explicitly handle system constraints under future weather disturbances, but can become computationally demanding when using sufficiently long prediction horizons for (relatively large) nonlinear greenhouse fruit production models. In contrast, reinforcement learning (RL) can learn control policies offline while considering longer-term economic performance, but struggles to enforce system constraints, and performance may degrade under unseen weather trajectories. This work proposes trajectory-selection RL-MPC, a framework that incorporates longer-term economic information of fruit yield into a short-horizon MPC optimization problem. The framework uses an RL rollout trajectory to define a terminal region constraint and terminal cost. Next, a nonlinear MPC solves a short-horizon optimization problem with these terminal ingredients to find a local optimum. Finally, the framework selects and executes the first input from the trajectory with the better objective value, either from the MPC-predicted or the RL rollout trajectory. The method is applied to GreenLight, a large-scale greenhouse tomato production model that exhibits stiff dynamics. The simulation results show that trajectory-selection RL-MPC with a one-hour prediction horizon matches the closed-loop performance of a high-performing guiding policy while significantly improving over standalone MPC with the same horizon.

The unit commitment (UC) problem is paramount for optimal operation of power systems, but it faces computational limitations in large-scale settings, especially in investment or stochastic models, because of the binary variables that it contains. A lot of research has attempted to improve the computational performance of UC models, either by reducing model size, resulting in lower fidelity and accuracy, or by improving the tightness of the formulation. Tightness and model size are the best a priori indicators of the computational performance of UC models, but there is no clear overview of what the best formulation is for different generators. In this research, we define models with different levels of detail, and present a formulation for each level that is based on the convex hull. We show new proofs on the tightness of well-known formulations for ramping, and for start-up and shut-down costs and capabilities. These models, with a different level of detail, can be incorporated into large-scale problems to reduce the computational burden, as demonstrated in Part II.

Humanoid robots can extend human presence to remote, constrained, or hazardous environments, but existing teleoperation interfaces often require physically demanding motion tracking or cognitively demanding low-level control. This paper presents an immersive teleoperation framework that integrates voice-controlled locomotion, VR-based manipulation, and bidirectional social interaction for whole-body humanoid control. Using Apple Vision Pro, the operator receives egocentric visual feedback, issues natural-language locomotion commands, and teleoperates the robot's arms and dexterous hands through wrist and finger tracking. An LLM-assisted voice-control module converts spoken instructions into high-level locomotion commands, while the manipulation module retargets human hand motions to the robot through inverse kinematics and PD control. The system also records multimodal data, including egocentric RGB observations, voice/text commands, joint states, hand motions, and eye-gaze signals, supporting future imitation learning and autonomy. We evaluate the framework on a Unitree H1 humanoid equipped with dexterous hands in manipulation and social interaction tasks. Results show that novice users can successfully operate the system after brief familiarization, achieving 80\% success in object manipulation and 70\% success in a social cube-passing task. These results demonstrate the potential of immersive, language-assisted teleoperation as an accessible interface for humanoid interaction, remote assistance, and multimodal data collection.

FFT-based spectral preprocessing of learned query-key (Q/K) projections substantially improves transformer attention on character-level language modelling. On TinyShakespeare: a fixed random spectral filter achieves val=1.031 (Delta=+0.443); a single learned frequency at paragraph scale achieves val=0.608 (Delta=+0.867); and four learned frequencies spanning paragraph to word scale achieve val=0.309 (Delta=+1.166), a 79% reduction over standard dot-product attention. The single-frequency result is confirmed across three random seeds (mean val=0.236, std=0.019). The four frequencies converge to a near-geometric multi-scale ordering (49, 27, 10, 6 tokens/cycle) corresponding to paragraph, sub-paragraph, phrase, and word scales. The gain is specific to spectral preprocessing: random orthogonal and non-orthogonal projections of Q/K produce no measurable improvement, suggesting the benefit comes from global frequency-domain mixing rather than metric distortion. All results are verified by a shuffled-validation diagnostic against positional leakage. Causal filters (Gaussian, Mexican Hat, Morlet) do not improve over standard attention at character-level tokenisation: the bilateral FFT kernel is structurally non-causal, coupling every position to future tokens. This defines an architectural boundary between bilateral spectral attention (this paper) and genuinely causal spectral attention at word-scale tokenisation (companion paper MorletQK). This work is architecturally distinct from FNet (Lee-Thorp et al., 2021), which replaces attention with Fourier mixing of token embeddings. Here, spectral preprocessing applies only to Q/K projections while the full attention score structure is preserved.

Accurate mapping of informal settlements remains a major challenge in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities because optical imagery often fails to distinguish Informal Settlements (defined here as LCZ 7) from spectrally similar formal Compact Low-Rise areas (LCZ 3). This study presents a context-aware, reproducible Optical-SAR framework that improves informal settlement delineation using Sentinel-2 spectral features and Sentinel-1 structural information within an adapted Local Climate Zone (LCZ) taxonomy. We implement a three-tier SAR integration strategy: calibrated backscatter, GLCM textures, and a physics-guided feature engineered to capture the high structural disorder and weak radar return characteristic of SSA informal settlements. Using reference data across Nairobi and Eldoret (Kenya), we evaluate performance via a stratified hold-out protocol and a season-aware ablation study. Results show that SAR textures provide the dominant performance gain for LCZ 7 detection. The Optical-SAR model achieves overall accuracy of 0.816 (dry) and 0.807 (wet), significantly outperforming the WUDAPT baseline (OA 0.704) and reducing the critical LCZ 3 - LCZ 7 confusion to 7%. Seasonal analysis indicates that while optical-only separability varies with phenology, SAR-derived textures stabilize informal settlement mapping across seasons. These findings demonstrate that the incorporation of SAR-derived features yields consistent improvements for urban morphology mapping in data-scarce environments across seasons and across the evaluated source cities, while cross-city transfer remains limited without local adaptation strategies.

In data-driven nonlinear control, optimal controllers designed from learned models are inevitably subject to model mismatch when deployed on actual systems, potentially compromising both closed-loop stability and optimality. This paper investigates how the model mismatch propagates through the optimal control structure and alters the resulting optimality. First, we show that the nominal optimal value function remains a Lyapunov function under a quantifiable criterion, thereby preserving closed-loop robust stability. Building upon this foundation, we establish explicit characterizations for optimality deviations induced by model mismatch in both closed-loop performance and optimal controllers, and then reveal their consistency with classical linear-quadratic results. In addition, the proposed analysis admits a unified computational formulation with a provably convergent iterative algorithm, enabling quantitative assessment of optimality robustness in nonlinear optimal control. Numerical examples validate the theoretical analysis, reveal its intrinsic connection with classical results, and demonstrate its practical computability.

The emergence of Quantum Software Engineering (QSE) responds to the need for systematic, disciplined, and quantifiable approaches to the development, operation, and maintenance of quantum software. Within this context, quantum computer certification represents a significant challenge: verifying that quantum devices produce valid entangled states despite hardware imperfections, noise, and decoherence. This paper presents QAccCert, a hybrid certification framework developed following QSE principles, demonstrating how heterogeneous technologies like FPGAs and Artificial Intelligence can be integrated for quantum processing. The framework implements entanglement certification through CHSH inequality violation in ideal quantum simulations using Qiskit AerSimulator. Through LLM-guided optimization, the system achieves 99.94% of the theoretical maximum of $2\sqrt{2}$, evidencing more efficient parameter space exploration than random search. These simulated results illustrate how QSE methodologies, combined with strategic technology interconnection, can be applied for practical and scalable quantum certification on real NISQ hardware in future work. This study provides a concrete case study of systematic quantum software development.

Electrical distribution networks are regional, medium- and low-voltage power grids connecting energy sources to individual households and businesses with given power demands. While these networks contain redundant power lines for reliability, they are typically operated in a radial (spanning tree) configuration by opening and closing switches on the lines. The challenge is to find a spanning tree that minimizes the sum of the resistive power losses: The power loss of a line $e$ is its resistance $r(e)$ times the squared current $f(e)^2$ flowing across the line. We study approximation algorithms for this problem, known as Distribution Network Reconfiguration (DNR). We give an $n$-approximation algorithm and, via a new NP-hardness for planar Balanced Connected Partition with a fixed number of parts, show that no $n^{1-\varepsilon}$-approximation is possible even on planar graphs unless P $=$ NP, for any $\varepsilon>0$. Since the approximation hardness holds only if there are many sources, we focus on $k$-DNR with $k$ sources; this is motivated by traditional distribution networks, where oftentimes $k = 1$. For $2$-DNR, we give an approximation lower bound of $\Omega(\log^2 n)$ conditioned on P $\neq$ NP. For $1$-DNR, which is equivalent to finding an uncapacitated confluent flow minimizing the squared Euclidean norm, we prove APX-hardness and give an $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$-approximation for uniform line resistances, answering an open question by Gupta et al. [Math. Program. 2022].

Is it possible to understand the intricacies of a dynamical system not solely from its input/output pattern, but also by observing the behavior of other systems within the same class? This central question drives the study presented in this paper. In response to this query, we introduce a novel paradigm for system identification, addressing two primary tasks: one-step-ahead prediction and multi-step simulation. Unlike conventional methods, we do not directly estimate a model for the specific system. Instead, we learn a meta model that represents a class of dynamical systems. This meta model is trained on a potentially infinite stream of synthetic data, generated by simulators whose settings are randomly extracted from a probability distribution. When provided with a context from a new system-specifically, an input/output sequence-the meta model implicitly discerns its dynamics, enabling predictions of its behavior. The proposed approach harnesses the power of Transformers, renowned for their \emph{in-context learning} capabilities. For one-step prediction, a GPT-like decoder-only architecture is utilized, whereas the simulation problem employs an encoder-decoder structure. Initial experimental results affirmatively answer our foundational question, opening doors to fresh research avenues in system identification.

Subspace identification methods (SIMs) have proven to be very useful and numerically robust for building state-space models. While most SIMs are consistent, few if any can achieve the efficiency of the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE). Conversely, the prediction error method (PEM) with a quadratic criteria is equivalent to MLE, but it comes with non-convex optimization problems and requires good initialization points. This contribution proposes a weighted null space fitting (WNSF) approach for estimating state-space models, combining some key advantages of the two aforementioned mainstream approaches. It starts with a least-squares estimate of a high-order ARX model, and then a multi-step least-squares procedure reduces the model to a state-space model on canoncial form. It is demonstrated through statistical analysis that when a canonical parameterization is admissible, the proposed method is consistent and asymptotically efficient, thereby making progress on the long-standing open problem about the existence of an asymptotically efficient SIM. Numerical and practical examples are provided to illustrate that the proposed method performs favorable in comparison with SIMs.

Network partitioning has gained recent attention as a pathway to enable decentralized operation and control in large-scale systems. This paper addresses the interplay between partitioning, observability, and sensor placement (SP) in dynamic networks. The problem, being computationally intractable at scale, is a largely unexplored, open problem in the literature. To that end, the paper's objective is designing scalable partitioning of linear systems while maximizing observability metrics of the subsystems. We show that the partitioning problem can be posed as a submodular maximization problem -- and the SP problem can subsequently be solved over the partitioned network. Consequently, theoretical bounds are derived to compare observability metrics of the original network with those of the resulting partitions, highlighting the impact of partitioning on system observability. Case studies on networks of varying sizes corroborate the derived theoretical bounds.

Integrating sensing and communication (ISAC) is a promising technology for predictive beamforming in 6G vehicle-to-everything (V2X) networks. However, current ISAC paradigms rely solely on radio-frequency (RF)-based sensing, which limits sensing resolution and beamforming robustness in complex wireless environments. Fortunately, the widespread deployment of diverse non-RF sensors such as cameras and LiDAR, along with the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and communication systems, offers new opportunities to improve the synergy between sensing and communication. Motivated by this, this work develops a multi-modal sensing-assisted beamforming framework for realistic V2X scenarios. Specifically, we propose BeamTransFuser, a hierarchical Transformer-based multi-modal learning framework that exploits cross-modal correlations among camera, LiDAR, radar, and GPS observations to improve beam prediction accuracy and robustness. To facilitate practical deployment on roadside units, we further develop a module-aware pruning scheme to reduce inference latency while preserving competitive performance. Furthermore, to address potential missing-modality conditions in real-world scenarios, we introduce a generative model that is able to reconstruct missing inputs from available observations, allowing the framework to operate reliably even under incomplete sensing conditions. Extensive experimental results conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed scheme consistently outperforms existing baselines across various metrics.

This paper unifies deterministic and stochastic Electromagnetic Information Theory (EIT) through symplectic geometry. For spatially incoherent sources, both formulations yield identical eigenvalues and spatial Number of Degrees of Freedom (NDF). In the asymptotic regime and in the absence of losses, this equivalence is shown to be a structural necessity: the radiometric étendue, the Hamiltonian phase-space volume, and the NDF are the same symplectic invariant of the source--observer configuration. Liouville's theorem guarantees conservation of the NDF under lossless propagation, while Gromov's Non-Squeezing Theorem establishes a minimum phase-space cell, setting a fundamental geometric bound on resolving power. The physical manifestation of this symplectic structure is the formation of \textit{Spatial Information Flows} (SIFs), defined operationally as the spatial loci along which the spatial coherence, equivalently the mutual information, decays at the minimum possible rate. Spatial information in electromagnetic fields is therefore governed by the geometry of the source--observer configuration, providing the foundation for a geometric theory of electromagnetic information.

This paper considers a power-splitting (PS)-based simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system employing a reconfigurable pinching antenna (PA) under probabilistic line-of-sight (LoS) blockage. We formulate a joint optimization of the PA position and PS ratio to maximize the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the user, subject to its average energy harvesting (EH) and PA placement range. We derive the closed-form solution. Results show that the EH requirement has a deterministic impact on the optimal PA position and its feasible region, requiring the PA close to the user for large channel gain. Moreover, stronger waveguide attenuation lowers the overall SNR and shifts the optimal PA toward the feed point, while heavier LoS blockage degrades the SNR uniformly with little change in the optimal PA position. Spatial PA adaptation combined with dynamic PS ensures robust SWIPT performance, and mechanical reconfigurability enhances sustainability by guaranteeing energy feasibility in dynamic environments.

Speech restoration aims to recover clean speech from degraded recordings affected by noise, reverberation, bandwidth reduction, or other distortions, where input and output sampling rates may differ. Existing approaches typically assume matched input-output rates and apply redundant resampling, limiting native multi-rate processing. We formulate this gap as the extended sampling-frequency-independent (xSFI) setting, where a model must operate under decoupled input-output rates, and propose TF-Restormer, a query-based xSFI modeling framework. The model encodes only the observed input band and synthesizes the unobserved high-frequency band through extension queries with band-partitioned cross-attention, yielding an asymmetric encoder-decoder that allocates capacity to analysis while keeping synthesis lightweight. Trained with a perceptual loss, a scaled log-spectral loss, and adversarial supervision via an SFI-STFT discriminator, TF-Restormer attains balanced fidelity-perceptual quality as a single unified model, without redundant resampling across denoising, dereverberation, bandwidth extension, and combined distortion benchmarks under multiple sampling rates.

The growing integration of distributed renewable generation and the electrification of heating and transportation are rapidly increasing the number of flexible devices within modern distribution grids. Leveraging the aggregated flexibility of these small-scale distributed resources is essential to maintaining future grid-wide stability. This work uses the Swiss distribution grid of Walenstadt as a case study to provide insights into the aggregated flexibility potential of distribution grids. It demonstrates that incorporating devices such as heat pumps and photovoltaic systems significantly enhances distribution grid flexibility. It investigates the time-varying nature of aggregated flexibility and highlights how it can vary seasonally. Furthermore, simulations of future scenarios reveal that aggregated flexibility does not increase linearly or monotonically with higher levels of flexible device penetration. This is primarily due to the overloading of individual feeders, which underscores the impact of grid topology and network constraints on the aggregated flexibility potential.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has emerged as a key enabler for providing signal coverage, energy efficiency, reliable communication, and physical layer security (PLS) in next-generation wireless communication networks. This paper investigates an artificial noise (AN)-driven RIS-assisted secure communication system. The RIS is partitioned into two segments, where the first segment is configured to direct the communication signal (CS) toward the legitimate user (Bob), and the other one is configured to steer the AN toward the eavesdropper (Eve). To this end, iterative and discrete Fourier transform-based algorithms are developed for practical RIS phase shift optimization. The power allocation between the CS and the AN signals is optimized in such a way that the secrecy capacity (SC) is maximized while limiting Eve's channel capacity. The proposed PLS framework is evaluated through both simulations and software defined radio based testbed experiments. The results demonstrate promising improvements in the SC, highlighting the potential of AN-driven RIS-assisted PLS for practical deployments.

As is well known, classical PID control is ubiquitous in industrial processes, yet a rigorous and explicit design theory for nonlinear uncertain MIMO second-order systems remains underdeveloped. In this paper we consider a class of such systems with both uncertain dynamics and an unknown but strictly positive input gain, where the nonlinear uncertainty is characterized by bounds on the Jacobian with respect to the state variables. We explicitly construct a three-dimensional region for the PID gains that is sufficient to guarantee global stability and asymptotic tracking of constant references for all nonlinearities satisfying these Jacobian bounds. We then derive a corresponding necessary region, thereby revealing the inherent conservatism required to cope with worst-case uncertainties. Moreover, under additional structural assumptions on the nonlinearities, these sufficient and necessary regions coincide, yielding a precise necessary-and-sufficient characterization of all globally stabilizing PID gains. All these regions are given in closed form and depend only on the prescribed Jacobian bounds and the known lower bound of the input gain, in contrast to many qualitative tuning methods in the literature.

Non-strict control barrier function (CBF) conditions guarantee safety through forward invariance, but they do not preclude trajectories from remaining near the safe-set boundary for extended continuous time intervals. This paper develops a finite boundary-layer residence certificate for such settings. The certificate preserves the standard non-strict CBF safety condition and uses a bounded auxiliary function whose derivative is bounded away from zero in a prescribed boundary layer, yielding an explicit upper bound on every uninterrupted residence interval. For control-affine systems, a selected auxiliary branch is implemented as an additional affine constraint in a CBF-QP, and a tangential-input compatibility condition is given to ensure simultaneous feasibility with the hard CBF constraint for unconstrained inputs. A local-chart version handles angular or multi-valued auxiliary functions such as $\operatorname{atan2}$. Single-integrator, double-integrator, and nonholonomic unicycle examples illustrate the resulting radial--tangential construction and its local-chart and feasibility limitations.

Conventional delay-Doppler (DD) communication and sensing systems require transmitting pilot frames at every channel coherence time interval in order to keep track of channel variations at the cost of spectral efficiency. In this paper, we propose an approach to utilize data transmissions that modulate arbitrary waveforms with zero-mean, unit average energy symbols for DD channel estimation without requiring pilot transmissions in every coherence time interval. Numerical evaluation over practical doubly-selective channel models demonstrate $\sim 1.8 \times$ improvement in uncoded spectral efficiency with our proposed data-based approach over conventional pilot-based approaches across various $6$G modulation schemes.

This paper develops a local shifted-passivity certificate for a synchronous generator operating on a synchronous periodic orbit. The main difficulty is that the natural shifted energy balance contains an angle-frequency coupling term and a residual terminal-voltage coupling, which prevent a direct passivity inequality. We resolve these obstructions by augmenting the storage with an angle-frequency cross term and by introducing a rotor-angle-synchronized terminal current injection. The resulting algebraic conditions certify local strict dissipation of the augmented generator storage. As an application, we interconnect the certified generator models with dynamic transmission lines, shunt capacitors, and monotone static loads, and obtain a compositional sufficient condition for local asymptotic stability of the synchronous orbit.

We propose a knowledge-driven approach to speech target extraction in the presence of background sound effects already recorded in cinematic audio. The specific knowledge sources studied are manners of articulation that are detected in speech frames and adopted to form a knowledge vector as a part of features to enhance speech separation and target speech extraction because some short speech segments are often difficult to separate from mixed background sounds. Testing on the recent Sound Demixing Challenge data for cinematic audio source separation (CASS) shows that utilizing articulator-aware knowledge sources produces better separation results than those obtained without using any knowledge, especially for speech segments buried in unspecified background sound events.

Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is widely used for the in vivo characterization of disease stage and progression in Alzheimer's disease (AD). With the adoption of multiple tau PET tracers including AV-1451, PI-2620, MK-6240 with different binding behaviors in various large-scale studies, there is a great need of effective harmonization methods to enable the cross-tracer integration of tau PET datasets. While previous methods such as CenTauR were proposed to standardize scalar tau PET measures, they are limited in accounting for the heterogeneity of tau pathology. In this work, we propose Feynman-Kac Reweighted Schrödinger Bridge Matching (FKRSBM), a surface-based framework for cross-tracer tau PET harmonization. FKRSBM learns a direct stochastic transport between tracer domains using Schrödinger Bridge matching, avoiding the Gaussian-prior routing used in diffusion-based translation. To promote biologically consistent transport, FKRSBM introduces an endpoint penalty favoring bridge pairings with matched tau-pathology status and implements it through a Feynman-Kac reweighted endpoint proposal. To preserve cortical organization, FKRSBM uses a spherical convolutional network for vertex-level harmonization on cortical surface meshes. In our experiments, we demonstrate our method by harmonizing Tau PET images acquired with the AV-1451 (n=1480) and PI-2620 (n=2458) tracers from two large-scale datasets. Compared to previous methods including ComBat, CycleGAN, Diffusion Model(DF), and unregularized Schrödinger Bridge Model(DSBM), the proposed FKRSBM method outperforms these baselines in subgroup-level alignment, tau-positivity consistency, and diagnostic classification while preserving subject-specific cortical topography of tau pathology. The code is available at: this https URL.

Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) research for Text-to-Speech (TTS) focuses on large language models (LLMs), leaving Flow-Matching (FM) under-explored. We present FlowTTS-GRPO, an online RL framework for FM-based TTS. By converting ordinary differential equation (ODE) trajectories into stochastic differential equation (SDE) paths, our method enables direct fine-tuning of open-source FM models without auxiliary models. We show that a weighted reward combination converges faster than a probabilistic scheme, and identify three practical optimizations: omitting classifier-free guidance (CFG) during training accelerates convergence; synthesizing hard cases improves robustness; and applying RL to the FM component enhances audio-detail metrics. Experiments on CosyVoice 3.0 and F5-TTS demonstrate objective and subjective preference gains in speaker similarity and perceptual quality, with F5-TTS also improving intelligibility.

Translational acoustic-radio frequency (TARF) communication paves the way for translating information from an underwater acoustic signal to the over-the-air (OTA) electromagnetic receiver through the medium interface. The study and characterization of the channel is essential for establishing a reliable communication link. Although channel modeling has been extensively studied for OTA and underwater channels, the amplitude characteristics of the TARF cross-medium channel have not been investigated in comparison with well-known distributions to date. In this work, we define the signal model incorporating the effects of the wavefront-water surface interactions. With the help of numerical and graphical methods, we then attempt to characterize the cross-medium channel with empirical data using existing models developed for OTA and underwater channels. We further evaluate channel linearity and time invariance empirically. Observations from these studies over multiple experiments are detailed with additional discussions that enable better channel characterization to develop reliable and consistent cross-medium TARF communication in challenging scenarios.

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) provides a physical-layer credential for Internet of Things devices, but open-set decisions become fragile when a threshold calibrated on a source receiver is applied to a target receiver. Receiver shift can lower the confidence of known transmitters and cause false rejection, whereas closedset alignment can pull unseen target transmitters into known regions and increase false acceptance. This paper presents a Cross-Receiver Open-set Domain Adaptation framework via Structure-first Training (CRODA-ST) for RFFI. Discriminative Structure Anchoring (DSA) restores target-receiver known-class references from limited labeled target enrollment samples, and Rejection-Oriented Alignment (ROA) reduces receiver-sensitive confidence fluctuations around the anchored structure. On the WiSig ManyTx dataset, CRODA-ST achieves 0.9092 known-class accuracy, 0.9692 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC), 0.9580 open-set classification rate (OSCR), and a false positive rate of 0.0469 at a 90% true positive rate (FPR90). Additional evaluations on a controllable LoRa simulation dataset examine the method under synthesized hardware distortions.

Real-time safety assessment is critical for ensuring the reliable operation of complex dynamic systems. However, obtaining full safety labels in real time is often prohibitively expensive, resulting in a challenging mixed-feedback scenario dominated by partial feedback, especially under concept drift. Furthermore, existing online ensemble methods typically rely on heuristic weight allocation, lacking provable performance guarantees under such limited-feedback conditions. To address these challenges, we propose PB-OEL, a performance-bounded online ensemble learning framework designed for real-time safety assessment under mixed feedback. At the ensemble level, a theoretical framework is established to bound the performance of the ensemble classifier relative to its base classifiers across varying feedback ratios. By formally defining the form of expert advice, the bound guarantees that the ensemble outperforms any individual base classifier over a sufficiently large data stream. At the base-classifier level, a penalty-based update strategy is introduced, enabling base models to explicitly leverage misclassified samples rather than simply discarding them. Extensive experiments on the real-world Jiaolong manned submersible dataset demonstrate that PB-OEL maintains robust predictive performance and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Crop type classification from optical satellite time series remains limited in its ability to generalize across growing seasons, particularly when crop phenology shifts due to inter-annual weather variability. This hampers deployment in operational settings where current-year labels are unavailable. In addition, uncertainty quantification is often overlooked, reducing the reliability of such approaches for practical crop monitoring. Inspired by ecophysiological principles, we introduce Thermal Time-based Temporal Sampling ($T^3S$), a simple, model-agnostic method that replaces calendar time with thermal time. By re-indexing satellite observations by cumulative growing degree days, $T^3S$ aligns phenologically equivalent growth stages across years, reducing temporal redundancy while concentrating on the most biologically informative periods. We evaluate $T^3S$ across three architecturally distinct backbones on (i) SwissCrop, a new country-scale, multi-year Sentinel-2 dataset with paired temperature data that we publicly release, and (ii) the cross-region TimeMatch benchmark spanning Denmark and France. Across these settings, $T^3S$ consistently improves cross-year and cross-region crop classification over several state-of-the-art baselines, including thermal positional encoding, with particularly strong gains in uncertainty calibration, robustness under label scarcity, and early-season prediction, while requiring no architectural modification.

Environmental sound recordings often contain intelligible speech, raising privacy concerns that limit analysis, sharing and reuse of data. In this paper, we introduce a method that renders speech unintelligible while preserving both the integrity of the acoustic scene, and the overall audio quality. Our approach involves reversing waveform segments to distort speech content. This process is enhanced through a voice activity detection and speech separation pipeline, which allows for more precise targeting of speech. In order to demonstrate the effectivness of the proposed approach, we consider a three-part evaluation protocol that assesses: 1) speech intelligibility using Word Error Rate (WER), 2) sound sources detectability using Sound source Classification Accuracy-Drop (SCAD) from a widely used pre-trained model, and 3) audio quality using the Fréchet Audio Distance (FAD), computed with our reference dataset that contains unaltered speech. Experiments on this simulated evaluation dataset, which consists of linear mixtures of speech and environmental sound scenes, show that our method achieves satisfactory speech intelligibility reduction (97.9% WER), minimal degradation of the sound sources detectability (2.7% SCAD), and high perceptual quality (FAD of 1.40). An ablation study further highlights the contribution of each component of the pipeline. We also show that incorporating random splicing to our speech content privacy enforcement method can enhance the algorithm's robustness to attempt to recover the clean speech, at a slight cost of audio quality.

An associative memory (AM) enables cue-response recall, and it has recently been recognized as a key mechanism underlying modern neural architectures such as Transformers. In this work, we introduce the concept of distributed dynamic associative memory (DDAM), which extends classical AM to settings with multiple agents and time-varying data streams. In DDAM, each agent maintains a local AM that must not only store its own associations but also selectively memorize information from other agents based on a specified interest matrix. To address this problem, we propose a novel tree-based distributed online gradient descent algorithm, termed DDAM-TOGD, which enables each agent to update its memory on the fly via inter-agent communication over designated routing trees. We derive rigorous performance guarantees for DDAM-TOGD, proving sublinear static regret in stationary environments and a path-length dependent dynamic regret bound in non-stationary environments. These theoretical results provide insights into how communication delays and network structure impact performance. Building on the regret analysis, we further introduce a combinatorial tree design strategy that optimizes the routing trees to minimize communication delays, thereby improving regret bounds. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed DDAM-TOGD framework achieves superior accuracy and robustness compared to representative online learning baselines such as consensus-based distributed optimization, confirming the benefits of the proposed approach in dynamic, distributed environments.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) demand real-time collision prediction to ensure road safety and reduce accident severity. Conventional approaches rely on transmitting raw video or high-dimensional sensory data from roadside units (RSUs) to vehicles, which is impractical under vehicular communication bandwidth and latency constraints. In this work, we propose a semantic V2X framework in which RSU-mounted cameras generate spatiotemporal semantic embeddings of future frames using the Video Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (V-JEPA). To evaluate the system, we construct a digital twin of an urban traffic environment enabling the generation of d verse traffic scenarios with both safe and collision events. These embeddings of the future frame, extracted from V-JEPA, capture task-relevant traffic dynamics and are transmitted via V2X links to vehicles, where a lightweight attentive probe and classifier decode them to predict imminent collisions. By transmitting only semantic embeddings instead of raw frames, the proposed system significantly reduces communication overhead while maintaining predictive accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the framework with an appropriate processing method achieves a 10% F1-score improvement for collision prediction while reducing transmission requirements by four orders of magnitude compared to raw video. This validates the potential of semantic V2X communication to enable cooperative, real-time collision prediction in ITS.

We propose two methodologies for modelling aggregated supply and demand curves in the EPEX SPOT Day\char45 Ahead market, emphasizing generative models as a way to recover distributional variability. The first is a low\char45 dimensional parametric representation that yields deterministic point forecasts; the second is a high\char45 dimensional order\char45 level representation that samples from a conditional distribution of plausible curves. Both model the full curve structure, enabling the analysis of price sensitivity, volume sensitivity, and price impact. The parametric representation uses plateau levels, elastic\char45 region boundaries, and polynomial coefficients, forecast with eXtreme Gradient Boosting. The main contribution is the generative representation, which uses price arrivals and volume\char45 increment marks and is implemented with conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models. Using French EPEX data from 2021 to 2024, we evaluate both approaches through curve reconstruction and a price\char45 maker storage optimization problem. The parametric implementation provides a deterministic reference, while the diffusion\char45 based implementation produces distributions of plausible curves and achieves higher realized profits and smaller gaps to an oracle benchmark in the storage application.

This paper investigates a six-wave mixing (SWM)-based Rydberg atomic receiver as a wideband radio frequency (RF)-to-optical quantum transducer. Specifically, we develop an explicit baseband input-output model that bridges the RF-induced atomic coherence to the detected optical readout. Based on the exact detected SWM response, we develop a reduced-order closed-form two-pole low-pass approximation under the near-resonant weak-signal of interest, which provides an analytical insight into how the 3-dB bandwidth is manipulated by the dressed higher-level atomic dynamics and optical/RF parameters. The validity range of this approximation is then quantified to clarify the operating conditions under which this reduced-order model accurately represents the exact SWM response. We further characterize the linear dynamic range by employing the 1-dB compression point (P1dB) and the input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3), unveiling a communication-compatible characterization of the bandwidth-sensitivity-linearity trade-off. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that SWM can achieve a 3-dB bandwidth of approximately 10 MHz while maintaining favorable linearity and sensitivity under the strict low-pass condition. The comparison with the EIT regime indicates that the two schemes should be treated as complementary rather than universally ordered. From an engineering perspective, the preferred SWM operating region is therefore not the one with the largest bandwidth, but the one that simultaneously provides a large bandwidth, acceptable sensitivity, favorable linearity, and low-pass regularity.

Uplink performance remains a critical limitation in modern 5G networks, where UEs have to balance limited transmission power against propagation challenges. We conducted extensive measurements in the University of Notre Dame's football stadium, which has a seating capacity of 80,000 spectators, evaluating network behavior under both unloaded (pregame) and severely congested (game day) conditions, with a focus on uplink performance. Analyzing PHY-layer metrics captured via the Rohde & Schwarz QualiPoc, we show that high-frequency TDD bands in the uplink are severely bottlenecked in both the spectral and temporal domains. Despite transmitting near maximum 3GPP power limits, propagation loss inherent to high-frequency bands restricts UEs to low MCS indices and low PRB allocations, even in unloaded networks. This inability to achieve wideband allocation is further compounded by the significantly smaller number of uplink slots compared to downlink slots in TDD frames. Consequently, we observe a severe disparity between uplink and downlink: while high-frequency TDD bands carry the majority of downlink throughput, the network relies heavily on lower-frequency FDD bands for uplink. Additional measurements under favorable propagation conditions around a Verizon COW deployment located in the stadium parking lot also show that this limitation is not solely propagation-driven; rather, the duplexing scheme itself also plays a significant role. Even when TDD bands achieve higher or comparable MCS, FDD bands have a performance edge in the uplink due to the restrictive, downlink-heavy TDD architecture. These findings emphasize the indispensable role of low-frequency FDD spectrum in sustaining uplink capacity, providing insights that will help guide the design of next-generation wireless networks.

Current Physical AI (PAI) relies heavily on closed-loop visual-servoing pipelines, whose perception and planning stages may become computationally intensive onboard due to complex models embedded on robots. In practice, offloading the perception task to on-site edges statically is inappropriate for latency-sensitive, precise industrial settings over a standardized industrial network. This emphasizes the importance of Control-Communication-Computing (3C) co-design in industrial automation: monolithic local execution saturates AI-accelerated machine and robot hardware, while static edge offloading exposes the control loop to network jitter. Existing adaptive task placement (ATP) controllers can partially address the gap by relocating a single pipeline stage on binary threshold rules, without a multi-stage model and an explicit cost on placement switching. In this paper, we propose a directed acyclic graph (DAG) based quality-of-service (QoS)-aware dynamic task placement (DTP) framework for sensing-perception-planning-control pipelines in networked robotics. This pipeline is formalized as a DAG with task-level and node-level attributes for compute cost, communication delay, and feasible placement sets; over a small interpretable candidate set (fully local, static offload, hybrid), a window-based cost function combines tail end-to-end latency, deadline violation rate, hardware utilization, and a Hamming-distance switching penalty, and a DTP algorithm with hysteresis and a minimum dwell-time bounds placement chatter. Our work presents the theoretical framework, a structured qualitative analysis, and a two-phase simulation plus hardware-in-the-loop validation roadmap.

Distributed acoustic emission (AE) sensing is critical for early detection of structural degradation, yet conventional electrical sensors are difficult to scale and fiber-based approaches are limited by interrogation complexity and resolution. Here, we report an intelligent fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing system enabled by machine learning (ML)-trained hybrid III-V/SiN tunable lasers that achieve uniform, mode-hop-free, sub-picometer wavelength control. A supervised gradient-descent algorithm is used to learn the nonlinear electro-thermal tuning space of Vernier-based external-cavity lasers, enabling continuous tuning with <0.1 pm resolution and <0.5 dB power variation. This capability allows precise alignment to FBG reflection slopes for high-sensitivity acoustic detection. We demonstrate a four-laser interrogation system monitoring 16 FBG sensors distributed across multiple metallic structures, operating over a 35 nm wavelength span. The system autonomously identifies sensor resonances, dynamically tracks spectral shifts, and reconfigures interrogation wavelengths in response to localized acoustic events. Using pencil-lead break tests as calibrated AE sources, we show simultaneous multi-channel detection and adaptive spatial localization. The combination of narrow linewidth (<10 kHz), wide tunability, and ML-driven calibration enables robust, scalable, and high-resolution sensing. This approach establishes a pathway toward fully autonomous, distributed photonic sensing networks for real-time structural health monitoring.

Microbial keratitis requires rapid pathogen identification to guide treatment, but culture- and PCR-based diagnostics are slow and resource-intensive. We developed a triple-phase multimodal framework for bacterial-versus-fungal keratitis classification using slit-lamp photographs acquired under blue-light, sclerotic-scatter, and white-light illumination, together with clinical metadata. The model combines cross-modality contrastive learning, modality-specific fine-tuning, and feature-level multimodal ensemble learning for patient-level prediction. We evaluated the framework on a multicenter dataset of 1,645 patients and 17,158 images from India and the United States. The model achieved 85.84% accuracy, 84.46% average F1-score, and 0.885 AUC. Site-specific evaluation showed that pooled results were overly optimistic, whereas resampling- and balance-based re-evaluation provided a more realistic assessment of cross-site generalization. Under all settings, our framework remained the top-performing approach. The code is available at this https URL and dataset access will be provided subject to University of Michigan data-sharing clearance.