We present a clinically deployed end-to-end auto-contouring system for cervical cancer radiotherapy planning, anchored by the Boundary-Aware Transformer with Region-Aware Mamba (BAT-RM), a hybrid architecture that integrates Sobel-gated boundary attention, a linear-time, multi-directional Mamba module for long-range context, and a boundary-skeleton-guided fusion gate. This design achieves linear-time complexity for long-range context modeling, avoiding the quadratic cost of full spatial self-attention. The full pipeline spans multi-institutional data collection, rigorous inter-rater quality assurance, external validation in an independent cohort, and a web-based clinical interface natively compatible with Varian, RayStation, and Monaco. Against four baselines, BAT-RM achieves superior performance across seven anatomical classes, with statistically significant improvements in target volumes, including GTV and CTV, and in organs at risk such as the rectum and bladder. A prospective multi-center reader study involving 13 radiation oncologists demonstrated that AI assistance elevates junior oncologists' IoU from 0.899 to 0.965, approaching senior-level accuracy, while reducing contouring time by more than 80%. The system also reduced expert consultation rates and improved inter-reader consistency, reflecting gains in both efficiency and quality assurance. Following clinical deployment at a partner hospital, the system reduced patient wait times from days to hours without additional staffing, enabling same-day or next-day initiation of treatment for routine cases. BAT-RM demonstrates that a rigorous research pipeline, from data curation to clinical deployment, can translate directly into measurable patient benefit in resource-constrained settings where the demand for radiotherapy far exceeds specialist capacity.

Low-altitude uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) can pose growing risks to airspace safety, security, and privacy. Cellular infrastructure can passively sense them without dedicated radar hardware by exploiting integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology. Most prior work exploits monostatic sensing or bistatic/multistatic configurations based on downlink measurements. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first uplink framework, where multiple user equipments (UEs) transmit sounding reference signal (SRS) pilots and the base station (BS) receives the UAV-scattered echoes. Sensing from uplink SRS, however, introduces new challenges. Each UE has its own oscillator and timing loop, so the channel estimate at the BS carries residual timing, frequency, and amplitude impairments that corrupt the UAV delay and Doppler. Moreover, the UAV echo is weaker than both the line-of-sight (LOS) path and urban clutter, so detection from a single UE transmission is not reliable. We address these challenges by designing a LOS-referenced synchronization scheme and a joint detector. The synchronization reuses the existing timing advance (TA) command and an adjacent-occasion conjugate product to remove the residuals without additional signaling. Then the detector searches a shared 3D state space and accumulates evidence across UEs. It leverages a normalized contrast that exploits the bistatic geometry. We evaluate the framework in a cluttered urban scene at frequency range 1 (FR1) with four pedestrian UEs and a 100 MHz 5G New Radio (NR) waveform. The proposed pipeline achieves sub-nanosecond synchronization and a 4.84 m median 3D position error.

Streaming contraction certificates, which determine in real time whether observed data is sufficient to certify a safe control action, face two structural challenges: the disturbance distribution shifts during operation, and the system consists of coupled subsystems whose joint model is unavailable. This paper addresses both. First, we develop a Wasserstein-robust certificate beta_cert(t,epsilon) = beta_hat(t) - rho(t)(1+2epsilon(t)), where epsilon(t) is estimated online from the empirical excess kurtosis of recent residuals, so the certificate degrades gracefully under distributional shift rather than failing catastrophically. Second, we prove that local certificates beta_A and beta_B, estimated independently from each subsystem's data, compose into a network-level guarantee via beta_net = (beta_A+beta_B)/2 - sqrt[(beta_A-beta_B)^2/4 + gamma^2] > 0 whenever gamma < sqrt(beta_Abeta_B), with no joint model required. On a five-node G5 benchmark under three noise regimes - Gaussian, heavy-tailed Laplace, and spike events - the Wasserstein certificate remains valid in 73% of spike-regime timesteps versus 33% for the Gaussian baseline (2.2x improvement), while the Gaussian certificate never authorizes deployment during the spike window. The compositional framework correctly identifies all three coupling regimes from local data alone, with gamma_warn = sqrt(beta_A*beta_B) is approximately 0.98, precisely predicting network-level contraction loss.

High deployment cost, poor spatial coverage and susceptibility to storm conditions are all challenges faced by traditional in-situ methods. This paper presents a video-based and high performance computing (HPC) enabled deep learning framework for joint sensor free estimation of five coastal wave parameters, namely significant wave height (Hs), maximum wave height (Hmax), peak period (Tp), zero upcrossing period (Tz) and wave direction (theta) from monocular coastal video. The proposed architecture comprises of a V-JEPA (self supervised) ViT Small backbone for robust spatiotemporal feature extraction in visually challenging scenarios, a dual-stream SlowFast temporal encoder for broad bandwidth representation of wave motion in both hydrodynamic breaking and swell regimes, an optical flow stream based on Farneback optical flow algorithm for adding saliency information to the structure with emphasis on hydrodynamically active wavelength bands of waves, and a multi-task regression layer with dispersion constraints (Airy wave dispersion lambda_p = 0.1). The model was trained on an NVIDIA DGX A100 cluster and was early stopped at epoch 31 and achieved Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.451, 0.578, 0.643, 0.680 and 0.832 for Hs, Hmax, Tp, Tz and wave direction respectively, with generalization ability to geographically diverse held out test data sites. While operating in a data-limited regime (6 annotated training scenes), the framework demonstrates statistically significant temporal correlations (PCC of 0.451 to 0.832), confirming proof of concept feasibility; R2 values (max 0.246) indicate that variance capture will improve with larger annotated datasets.

Breast ultrasound is widely used for screening, yet automated analysis remains challenging due to speckle noise, acquisition variability, and weak separation of benign and malignant cases in standard ultrasound imaging. Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently emerged as a promising approach by leveraging relationships among similar patient samples. However, it remains unclear how the choice of image encoder influences graph construction and downstream classification performance. In this work, we systematically evaluate five image encoders spanning convolutional and transformer-based architectures for GCN-based breast ultrasound classification. Image embeddings are used to construct cosine similarity k-nearest-neighbor graphs, which are classified using a single-layer GCN with a linear classification head. Across three patientwise cross-validation folds, higher-capacity encoders consistently improve graph homophily and downstream classification performance, yielding gains in accuracy, AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score. Moreover, test-set graph homophily exhibits a strong linear correlation with classification accuracy, with higher-capacity encoders consistently occupying the high-homophily, high-accuracy region suggesting that encoder-driven improvements in graph structure are a key mechanism underlying the observed performance gains. These findings establish encoder selection as a critical factor in graph-based breast ultrasound classification and identify graph homophily as a key indicator linking representation quality to downstream classification performance.

We consider a downlink multicell multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in an urban region, with a focus on improving the capacity of cell-edge user equipments (UEs). These UEs typically experience lower rates than near UEs because of shadowing, path loss, and inter-cell interference (ICI). To address this issue, we integrate a high-altitude platform station (HAPS) with the terrestrial network as a relay for edge-UE transmissions. We assume that the HAPS operates in full-duplex (FD) mode and exploits its large physical size to enhance passive self-interference (SI) suppression by separating its transmit and receive antennas. In the proposed scheme, each terrestrial base station (BS) forwards edge-UE data to the FD-HAPS, which then relays the data to the intended edge UEs. To design beams at both BSs and HAPS, we formulate a sum-rate maximization problem for under total transmit-power and minimum quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. To solve the resulting non-convex problem, we develop a centralized algorithm based on successive convex approximation (SCA) and alternating optimization (AO) for fast convergence. Simulation results show that relaying information via FD-HAPS significantly improves the capacity of cell-edge UEs compared with a terrestrial-only network.

Background: Deep learning models can classify thyroid nodules on ultrasound, but reliable clinical decision support also requires calibrated probabilities, uncertainty estimation, and selective referral, particularly under dataset shift. Methods: We developed a calibrated deterministic five-member deep ensemble for ROI-based thyroid nodule classification and selective image-based triage. TN5000 was used for model development, five-fold cross-validation, member-wise vector-scaling calibration, and fold-specific threshold selection. TN3K served as an independent external dataset-shift evaluation. The framework used ConvNeXt-Tiny with squeeze-and-excitation attention, ensemble-mean malignancy probability, and mutual information (MI) as an ensemble-disagreement score. A three-tier policy assigned images to No-FNA suggestion, FNA recommendation, or radiologist review. Results: On pooled out-of-fold TN5000 predictions, the ensemble achieved AUC-ROC 0.9395, AP 0.9715, ECE 0.0088, and Brier score 0.0813. At 50% nominal MI retention, 7.2% of cases received a No-FNA suggestion, 39.9% an FNA recommendation, and 52.9% radiologist review, with 98.3% No-FNA NPV and 99.83% malignancy capture. On TN3K, AUC-ROC decreased to 0.7870, AP to 0.7254, ECE increased to 0.1899, and Brier score to 0.2281. The frozen TN5000 policy assigned 83.7% to review, 1.0% to No-FNA, and 15.3% to FNA recommendation. No malignant image entered the No-FNA pathway, but FNA-recommendation PPV fell to 76.6%. Conclusion: The framework showed strong internal discrimination and calibration, but limited external threshold transportability. Selective prediction may help identify images unsuitable for automated triage, but local recalibration, threshold validation, and prospective clinical evaluation are required before deployment.

Wearable ultrasound enables continuous monitoring of physiological processes such as muscle dynamics, bladder volume, and cardiovascular activity. Existing fully wearable ultra-low-power platforms are limited to shallow, low-channel A-mode sensing, while larger multi-mode systems are too bulky and power-hungry for true wearability. We present WULPUS PRO, a runtime-programmable wearable ultrasound acquisition platform measuring $39\times21\times6 \mathrm{mm}$ and weighing $5 \mathrm{g}$. It integrates $30 \mathrm{V}$ excitation, 16 time-multiplexed channels, a low-noise receive front-end with up to $70 \mathrm{dB}$ gain, $9.9 \mathrm{MHz}$ bandwidth, time-gain compensation, and $32 \mathrm{dB}$ SNR. The platform supports deep-tissue echo acquisition up to $2.2 \mathrm{MHz}$ in RF-sampling mode and $8 \mathrm{MHz}$ in envelope-detection mode. We demonstrate B-mode imaging in a 16-channel ultra-low-power wearable with sub-millimeter axial and millimeter-scale lateral resolution in phantom experiments, while consuming $40 \mathrm{mW}$ at $50 \mathrm{Hz}$ PRF and under $60 \mathrm{mW}$ at $300 \mathrm{Hz}$ PRF. WULPUS PRO supports both piezoelectric and capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers, enabling integration with skin-conformal polymer-based CMUT arrays. As a host-agnostic acquisition front-end, it exposes standard data and power interfaces for BLE- and Wi-Fi-based wearable hosts. We demonstrate wireless transmission with external BLE and Wi-Fi modules and project 1-2 days of BLE operation at $50 \mathrm{Hz}$ PRF and over 3 h of Wi-Fi streaming at $300 \mathrm{Hz}$ PRF using a $300 \mathrm{mAh}$, $6.4 \mathrm{g}$ Li-Po cell. WULPUS PRO establishes a new class of fully programmable, B-mode-enabled, ultra-low-power wearable ultrasound platforms.

Accurately modeling the dynamics of planetary parachute and entry vehicle systems is critical for Entry, Descent, and Landing events such as vehicle separation and sensor activation. These dynamics are difficult to capture with traditional system-identification methods as parachute motion is highly nonlinear, the governing equations are not fully known, and relevant test data are scarce and expensive to acquire. In this work, we sidestep these challenges by leveraging a physics-aware generative modeling approach that learns parachute dynamics directly from data. The proposed method, Symplectic Parachute Generative Adversarial Network (SPar-GAN), adapts a Hamiltonian generative architecture to the parachute setting by conditioning on canopy design and freestream velocity, while enforcing conservation of energy through symplectic integration. We apply SPar-GAN to subscale parachute tests conducted at the National Full-Scale Aerodynamics Complex and show that it reproduces qualitatively accurate pitch-yaw dynamics of different parachute configurations while recovering a compact two-degree-of-freedom phase-space consistent with canopy axisymmetry. These results suggest that physics-constrained generative models can characterize parachute dynamics across operating conditions and may help reduce the volume of physical testing required to assess performance.

As the number of missions to cislunar space increases, the population of space objects in this region is expected to grow, making efficient uncertainty propagation essential for space situational awareness (SSA). This is complicated by the cislunar domain's vastness, chaotic dynamical environment, and limited availability of measurements. This paper presents an adaptive multi-fidelity uncertainty propagation method that dynamically adjusts the included perturbing forces based on position in cislunar space, minimizing computation time while maintaining a prescribed modeling accuracy. The proposed adaptive method is then integrated into a multi-target tracking framework to reduce the computational cost of track prediction without sacrificing accuracy, which is important for managing the growing number of objects in cislunar space. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated in simulated test cases relevant to upcoming cislunar missions and SSA applications, resulting in a significant reduction in computational cost compared to a non-adaptive approach while achieving equivalent or superior accuracy.

In this article we present a method to generate safe sets for linear discrete-time systems subject to non-convex constraints that can be represented as a union of polytopes. It is then shown how a reference governor can be implemented for safe reference tracking tasks. A theoretical analysis of the safe set is presented and properties of the reference governor scheme are derived. The guarantees include safety at any time as well as finite-time convergence of the applied reference command to any strictly admissible reference command. For the proposed reference governor, online computational overhead is low. Moreover, it is shown that for specific instances of the complex constraint sets, the safe set can be computed efficiently. Extensive simulation results demonstrating the applicability of the method and online/offline computation times are reported.

Measuring retinal fluid from optical coherence tomography (OCT) drives treatment decisions in macular disease, but manual annotation is slow and segmentation models trained on one scanner degrade on another. We present an attention-guided TransUNet that segments three fluid types across four independent OCT sources, combining a domain-adaptive normalisation scheme with an uncertainty estimate that flags unreliable pixels. The model reaches a mean fluid Dice of 0.78, and -- most usefully for clinicians -- its uncertainty is 1.34x higher exactly where expert graders disagree (p<10^-4), turning a raw segmentation map into an actionable clinical triage signal.

AI data centers are emerging as a dominant new load class with their power dynamics fundamentally from conventional industrial loads. Inside a training job, the bulk-synchronous-parallel algorithm moves each node through compute, sync, and checkpoint steps, which swings power between full load and near idle within seconds. Across the whole facility, jobs arrive, take blocks of nodes for hours to days, then leave, so the number of busy nodes changes daily, weekly, and yearly. This slower shift drives facility-wide swings and the peak demand that sets the size of the grid link. A model that looks only at within-job behavior, and treats the facility as a fixed set of busy nodes, smooths out these swings and misses the true peak-to-average ratio. This paper develops a hierarchical semi-Markov Data-Center (HSM-DC) load model that couples two layers across two timescales. A job-scheduling layer creates jobs through a non-homogeneous compound-Poisson process shaped by daily, weekly, and seasonal patterns, gives each job a heavy-tailed node count and length, and places jobs on a fixed pool of nodes on a first-come basis. A within-job layer moves each busy node through a five-state semi-Markov chain for the BSP steps, with state-based Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noise. Facility power comes from this changing node count and the per-node power, set to match measured node data and the facility's straight-line power-versus-load curve. Configured to the reference facility at the same scale, the model matches mean power, its spread, and the peak-to-average ratio across load levels, with fit scores of 0.9997, 0.92, and 0.82. It also matches the share of queued jobs to within one point at high load. Facility-wide swings and peak demand come from how jobs arrive and get scheduled, so grid planning must model that process, not just scale up a single node's power curve.

Machine-learned surrogates for the AC power flow (ACPF) problem amortize the cost of repeated solves on a fixed network, but lose one to two orders of magnitude of accuracy when a line outage changes the topology. This degradation is an operator shift. The altered admittance matrix changes the input-to-output map, so identical inputs yield a different output distribution. Existing methods correct this with target-topology data and per-topology gradient steps. We ask whether the correction can instead be made statistical and gradient-free. We propose In-Context Whitening (ICW), which trains an ACPF surrogate in an output space whitened by the base topology's first two moments, and adapts it to an unseen N-1 or N-2 topology by re-estimating that whitening from a few hundred solved cases on the new topology. This adaptation is gradient-free, weight-free, and architecture-agnostic. We prove that among affine whiteners the unique choice that preserves the coordinate-wise semantics of the physical output vector is ZCA whitening, so within efficient invertible corrections, two moments are sufficient. Across the IEEE 30-, 118-, and 300-bus systems under N-1 and N-2 contingencies, ICW reduces overall error by 6$\times$ to 28$\times$ over frozen surrogates (up to 54$\times$ per-quantity under N-2) and cuts worst-bus power-balance mismatch by up to 30$\times$, with consistent gains across three backbones. At deployment scale it matches or beats gradient-based adaptation in accuracy while adapting 21$\times$ to 34$\times$ faster, with a cost that parallelizes on commodity CPU cores rather than requiring one GPU per contingency.

Audio-language embedding models such as CLAP are widely evaluated on matching present sound events, but rarely on negation. We show this affirmation-only evaluation hides a key limitation: these models fail to encode negated sound concepts, mapping affirmative and negated captions to nearly identical representations. To expose this blind spot, we introduce NegEval-Audio, a framework that converts existing datasets into two negation-aware tasks, Retrieval-Neg and Multiple-Choice Negation (MCQ-Neg), to probe whether models distinguish present from absent events. On AudioCaps and Clotho, performance degrades sharply under negation, with negation-type MCQ accuracy falling far below chance, and the failure persists even for a recent multimodal LLM-based embedding model. While a training-free steering method improves MCQ-Neg, it yields marginal gains for Retrieval-Neg. This indicates that affirmation bias is a fundamental flaw in the representation geometry, necessitating explicit negation-aware training objectives.

This paper jointly optimizes the base-station (BS) continuous aperture array (CAPA) dimensions and beamforming functions to maximize energy efficiency (EE) of the downlink multiuser multi-CAPA system, where both the BS and the users are equipped with CAPAs. Since the beamforming functions are continuous current distribution over the BS CAPA, the resulting EE maximization problem is a nontrivial functional optimization problem that couples aperture sizing and beamforming design. To address this challenge, we propose a cascaded network architecture consisting of a graph neural network (GNN) and a functional-gradient based implicit neural representation (FGB-INR) to learn the BS CAPA dimensions and beamforming functions, respectively. Both networks exploit the permutation equivariance of the optimal optimization policy, and the update equations of FGB-INR are designed according to the functional-gradient structure of the EE objective. Simulation results show that the proposed method approaches the EE of the numerical method while substantially reducing inference latency. They also demonstrates that the functional-gradient structure in FGB-INR improves EE while reducing sample complexity and training time.

This paper studies learning-based MPC for constrained stabilization of discrete-time linear systems with unknown system parameters and additive bounded disturbances. We develop a tractable homothetic-tube MPC scheme in which a high-probability parameter confidence set is generated from non-asymptotic regularized least-squares estimation, rather than assumed a priori. The resulting uncertainty set is embedded into robust tube propagation and constraint tightening, yielding a convex formulation with linear and second-order-cone constraints. We prove high-probability recursive feasibility, robust constraint satisfaction, and input-to-state stability, together with explicit non-asymptotic state bounds. A numerical example illustrates the effectiveness and theoretical guarantees.

We classify the local maximizers of the entrywise fourth-power objective \[ Q\longmapsto \lVert Q\rVert_4^4 =\sum_{i,j=1}^r q_{ij}^4 \] over the real orthogonal group $\mathcal O(r)$. We prove that the signed permutation matrices are the only local maximizers, and hence the only global maximizers, in every dimension. More strongly, every other stationary point has an explicit rank-two tangent direction with strictly positive second variation. The proof is based on a maximum-entry pivot for the orthostochastic matrix $Q^{\circ2}$: the associated full Riemannian Hessian can be evaluated exactly and is positive at a largest nonunit squared entry. The argument is self-contained and handles zeros, repeated magnitudes, reducible support, and Hadamard-type stationary points.

This paper develops a scenario-free uncertainty-aware bilevel optimization framework for coordinated electric vehicle (EV) charging and reactive power support in distribution networks using distribution locational marginal prices (DLMPs). The upper-level EV aggregator jointly schedules active and reactive charging power to minimize charging costs, while the lower-level energy management system performs network-constrained economic dispatch and determines DLMPs subject to feeder and voltage constraints. To capture uncertainties in load demand and photovoltaic (PV) generation, a compact robust counterpart (RC) reformulation is developed that avoids the computational burden of large-scale stochastic programming and conventional robust optimization. Unlike existing robust counterpart methods that primarily assume Gaussian uncertainties, the proposed approach derives a deterministic reformulation for net-demand uncertainty modeled by a normal-minus-beta distribution, providing a more realistic representation of asymmetric load and renewable variability. An exactness lemma preserves the economic interpretation of DLMPs after KKT reformulation and Big-M linearization. EV chargers also provide reactive power support through non-unity power factor operation to improve voltage regulation. Simulation results on the IEEE 33-bus distribution system demonstrate improved voltage security, effective uncertainty-aware EV coordination, and significantly lower computational complexity than conventional stochastic and robust optimization approaches.

The direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem using one-bit quantized magnitude-only measurements is studied, where magnitude-only measurements offer robustness against phase errors, thereby avoiding the need for array calibration, while one-bit quantization significantly reduces hardware cost and system complexity. As their direct combination results in meaningless constant measurements, we formulate a sign-consistency optimization problem using a smooth logistic surrogate with ell_2,1-norm regularization to promote joint sparsity. To solve this problem, a proximal-gradient algorithm is developed with guaranteed convergence to a critical point. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves accuracy comparable to coherent one-bit baselines under ideal conditions, while maintaining robust performance under severe phase errors that substantially impair coherent methods.

Zero-shot dialog TTS benefits from flow-matching, but minute-scale generation on dense mel-spectrograms causes severe memory bottlenecks, often forcing unnatural chunked synthesis. We propose ZipL-Dialog, which shifts conditional flow-matching into a 4x time-compressed (25 Hz) latent space. To preserve acoustic fidelity under compression, we employ a deterministic mel autoencoder with auxiliary mel-domain supervision and optimize the ZipFormer's hierarchical downsampling schedule. Experiments show that ZipL-Dialog reduces maximum peak GPU memory by 11.22x and accelerates inference by 2.23x over the baseline, substantially lowering the memory footprint of single-pass multi-minute dialog synthesis while maintaining perceptual naturalness.

This paper proposes an affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM)-aided faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) waveform, termed AFDM-FTN, to enhance spectral efficiency (SE) in high-mobility communication scenarios. We first derive the AFDM-FTN input-output relationship and analyze the FTN-induced interference pattern in AFDM-FTN. To address the channel estimation challenges, a low-complexity channel estimator based on the basis expansion model (BEM) is developed. By exploiting the intrinsic characteristics of the AFDM channel matrix and the FTN coefficient matrix, a multi-layer message passing (MLMP) algorithm is proposed that leverages the sparsity of the time-domain (TD) channel and the FTN coefficient matrix, where belief messages are iteratively propagated across the TD channel, FTN, and transform layers. Building upon the BEM-assisted channel estimation and MLMP, a low-complexity joint channel estimation and data detection scheme (BEM-MLMP-JCED) is further developed to iteratively refine channel estimation with the aid of transmitted data. Finally, the channel estimation lower bound, the mean square error (MSE) performance of the BEM-MLMP-JCED, and the computational complexity are analyzed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AFDM-FTN system with BEM-MLMP-JCED achieves comparable BER to conventional AFDM while providing enhanced SE and reduced complexity compared to benchmark receivers.

Thanks to inter-element interconnections and flexible element arrangements, the beyond diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) breaks through the limitation of traditional RIS to achieve enhanced performance and enlarged coverage. However, existing BD-RIS research assumes that BD-RIS is always turned ON to assist transmission, while, in some scenarios where the transmitter-receiver direct link exists and remains strong, the performance gains of BD-RIS may not justify its manipulation complexity. In order to smartly use BD-RIS, a novel adaptive transmission scheme is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme first defines two working states of the BD-RIS, namely ON and OFF. Based on these two states, we design a new beam training protocol that enables BD-RIS to intelligently switch its working state according to real-time channel conditions. Furthermore, we construct a decision threshold as the decision basis for state switching to ensure the efficiency and reliability of protocol execution. Simulation results show that, without always turning ON the BD-RIS and performing sophisticated wave manipulation, the proposed protocol can guarantee successful transmission regardless of whether there is a strong transmitter-receiver link or not.

Modern cellular systems employ wide bandwidths and large antenna arrays to meet high data rate requirements. The high spatial and temporal resolution for communication also enables high-accuracy positioning as an ancillary benefit. Standard convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision Transformers have demonstrated excellent performance in positioning by leveraging delay-angle domain channel representations. However, they still face practical challenges in complicated cellular environments with low signal-to-noise ratios and severe inter-cell interference. This paper proposes a hybrid convolutional vision Transformer (ConViT) architecture that integrates the local receptive fields of CNNs to suppress local noise and employs Transformers to capture global attention among different multipath components. Various fusion strategies for combining signals from multiple distributed base stations are also evaluated. An extended Kalman filter with sensor fusion is applied to further mitigate long tail fluctuations of model estimates. Comprehensive validation is conducted with commercial long-term-evolution signals received by a large antenna array in urban environments with non line-of-sight signals and strong inter-cell interference. ConViT achieves a distance root mean square error (RMSE) of 3.46 meters and a yaw RMSE of 2.54 degrees, significantly outperforming benchmark models, while maintaining a lower parameter count and reduced computational complexity. Finally, a correspondence analysis between delay-angle power distributions and Transformer attention weights demonstrates the interpretability of the model.

Traditionally, hearing-aid speech enhancement (SE) algorithms rely on input-based feature estimation, often derived by a voice activity detector (VAD), to configure beamformers. Yet features extracted from noisy microphone signals can become unreliable in challenging acoustic scenes where users most need help. We introduce a novel paradigm in which the settings of a sound processing system are determined by evaluating characteristics of its output. To demonstrate this idea, we employ an output-based system that selects among a set of minimum power distortionless response (MPDR) beamformers. Although MPDR beamformers are typically avoided due to their sensitivity to steering errors, we show that they become effective within an output-based framework. We compare the proposed system to a conventional input-based minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) baseline. Experimental results show that the proposed system consistently outperforms the MVDR baseline, particularly at low SNRs, in terms of SNR, ESTOI and PESQ.

Automated epileptic seizure detection from multichannel electroencephalography (EEG) benefits from dimension reduction to obtain compact, discriminative representations. We compare four signal-space dimension reduction methods, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Dynamical Component Analysis (DyCA), Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD), and Average Volatility Dimensioning (AVD), for deep learning-based seizure detection on the Temple University Hospital Seizure Corpus (TUSZ v2.0.3). To enable a comparison of optimal combinations of representation and classifier, an autonomous AI-driven research framework independently optimizes architecture and hyperparameters for each representation. Measured by test ROC-AUC, the variance-based methods AVD (88.28%) and PCA (85.98%) paired with their respective optimal classifiers outperform the dynamics-based methods DMD (74.56%) and DyCA (74.85%) by over 10%, with AVD also showing the smallest validation-to-test gap. The best-performing classifier architecture differs across representations, indicating that representation and classifier should be optimized jointly. Our results highlight the importance of the input representation for EEG seizure detection and indicate the viability of autonomous AI-driven experimentation in biomedical signal processing.

Addressing the control and maneuverability of surface vehicles with dynamically changing mass distributions is still an open problem. To solve the problem, we propose an intelligent controller for the path-following problem of a surface vehicle, which is controlled through mass distribution. This means that one of the control inputs is mass-centric. Specifically, we developed a Lyapunov-based nonlinear control scheme to enable an unmanned vessel to follow a smooth path according to a line-of-sight guidance law. The control inputs consist of the thrust force for forward motion and the position of a sliding mass that shifts the system's overall mass distribution. Artificial neural networks are employed to estimate unmodeled dynamics and external disturbances. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller in guiding the vessel along the desired path with minimal error.

Medical image segmentation is a crucial task in the field of clinical analysis and applications. Though deep learning techniques recently play a crucial role in several scenarios, the training at the individual pixel level leads to a lack of geometric prior information. Scholars proposed to integrate the Chan-Vese model into the loss function for training which can take into account the region and length of the region inside and outside the segmentation process and then improve the performance in medical image segmentation. However, these methods still lack an effective characterization of the segmented region. To overcome this problem, we introduce the mean curvature as a geometric natural constraint and propose a Deep Active Contour and Mean Curvature (DACMC) loss function where the convolution kernel is used to approximate the mean curvature to save computational cost. We have validated the performance of our method on the liver and spleen dataset. Our proposed method demonstrates new state-of-the-art performance on several segmentation datasets.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is traditionally concerned with learning a control policy for a fixed environment. In many engineering systems, however, the environment itself is alterable: physical or operational parameters can be tuned to shape the transition dynamics and costs experienced by the agent. This motivates jointly optimizing both the policy and the environment design parameters. To this end, we establish an Environment Parameter Gradient Theorem -- a formal expression for the gradient of the value function with respect to environment parameters. The key theoretical device is a generalized action-value function $Q_{\pi,\xi}(s,a,\zeta)$, which comprises two copies of the environment parameters: $\zeta$ governs the cost and transition dynamics at the current state--action pair, while $\xi$ governs the future rollouts. This decoupling yields a tractable closed-form gradient expression and is essential to the theorem's derivation. Building on this result, we develop a model-free algorithm that simultaneously learns the optimal policy and the environment parameters. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework on a UAV network design problem, where the optimal UAV placement (environment parameters) and communication routes (governed by the policy) are learned jointly to minimize the total communication cost in the network.

The evolution of energy-efficient ultra-low-power (ULP) parallel processors and the diffusion of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are fueling the advent of autonomous driving nano-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). These sub-10 cm robotic platforms are envisioned as next-generation ubiquitous smart-sensors and unobtrusive robotic-helpers. However, the limited computational/memory resources available aboard nano-UAVs introduce the challenge of minimizing and optimizing vision-based CNNs -- which to date require error-prone, labor-intensive iterative development flows. This work explores methodologies and software tools to streamline and automate all the deployment of vision-based CNN navigation on a ULP multicore system-on-chip acting as a mission computer on a Crazyflie 2.1 nano-UAV. We focus on the deployment of PULP-Dronet, a state-of-the-art CNN for autonomous navigation of nano-UAVs, from the initial training to the final closed-loop evaluation. Compared to the original hand-crafted CNN, our results show a 2x reduction of memory footprint and a speedup of 1.6x in inference time while guaranteeing the same prediction accuracy and significantly improving the behavior in the field, achieving: i) obstacle avoidance with a peak braking-speed of 1.65 m/s and improving the speed/braking-space ratio of the baseline, ii) free flight in a familiar environment up to 1.96 m/s (0.5 m/s for the baseline), and iii) lane following on a path featuring a 90 deg turn -- all while using for computation less than 1.6% of the drone's power budget. To foster new applications and future research, we open-source all the software design in a ready-to-run project compatible with the Crazyflie 2.1

Microcontrollers with on-die neural processing units (NPUs) have become mainstream, but the system software hosting them has not: production combinations of Zephyr or FreeRTOS with TensorFlow Lite Micro treat AI inference as an application-layer library, leaving memory fragmentation, accelerator-state hygiene, and model-lifecycle guards as recurring application-developer concerns. We present the Phase 1 foundation of SynapticOS, an open-source runtime built on Zephyr that treats inference as a first-class workload. It contributes four cooperating subsystems: (1) a tensor-aware bump allocator with 16-byte DMA-aligned persistent and ephemeral lifetimes sharing a single arena, achieving constant-time allocation (~154 cycles per call, ~78,000 allocations per second at 150 MHz, invariant across tensor sizes) with zero fragmentation by construction; (2) a four-state hardware abstraction layer for the NPU and DSP, implemented by a deterministic software stub (for CI under QEMU) and a Neutron-flavoured backend (for the NXP MCXN947); (3) a three-state model lifecycle registry with duplicate-name detection, idempotent load/unload, and hot-swap guards; and (4) a four-mark cycle-accurate profiler. We evaluate on the NXP FRDM-MCXN947 (dual Cortex-M33 at 150 MHz) and the qemu_cortex_m3 emulator. Build footprints are 67 KB flash / 184 KB SRAM on FRDM (shell, 128 KB arena) and 24 KB flash / 28 KB SRAM on QEMU (no shell, 8 KB arena). End-to-end inference brackets through the deterministic stub kernel measure 1,038 us on FRDM and 781 us on QEMU for a 16x16x3 INT8 input; these are baseline overhead numbers, not Neutron silicon measurements, which arrive with the real SDK invoke path in Phase 2. A 61-test suite across 10 ZTEST suites passes 100% in 6.6 s on the CI emulator path. SynapticOS is released under Apache 2.0 at this https URL

This study proposes a Chroma from Luma (CfL)-enhanced Star-Tetrix transform (STT), referred to as CfL-STT, for improving raw image compression in JPEG XS. The proposed CfL-STT integrates CfL prediction into the STT to predict chroma components from the luma component in CFA-sampled raw images. Unlike conventional CfL prediction designed for full-color images, the proposed method employs spatially aligned luma samples obtained via linear interpolation along the horizontal and vertical directions to match the chroma sampling grid. This spatial alignment suppresses high-frequency sensor noise while preserving cross-channel correlation, resulting in a more decorrelated Y-Delta-Du-Dv color space. The proposed method was implemented in the JPEG XS reference software and evaluated on raw image datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that a direct application of CfL prediction yields image-dependent performance and may degrade coding efficiency due to the lack of spatial alignment, whereas the proposed CfL-STT consistently improves coding efficiency in lossless raw image compression while preserving exact reversibility.

Spatial information gleaned from multi-channel input has been shown to lead to improvements in meeting processing tasks like diarization and source separation. At the same time, diarization based on features extracted by large pretrained single-channel foundation models, such as WavLM, achieved state-of-the-art performance. This work compares three approaches to integrate spatial features into foundation model-based diarization systems: the cascade of a beamformer and a single-channel foundation model, a multi-channel foundation model, and the conditioning of the downstream network on explicitly extracted spatial features. Results show that the beamformer front-end is even detrimental to diarization performance in regions of overlapped speech, while best performance is achieved with the conditioning, demonstrating that the incorporation of explicit spatial features is a competitive approach to foundation-model-supported diarization. This approach is further subjected to a detailed error analysis showing that the conditioning system removes errors to a good extent that would occur when either only spectral or only spatial features were used.

Recent progress in compressing large-scale 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) data has substantially reduced storage footprint, network transmission bandwidth, and memory traffic to GPU caches before rendering. Yet decoding with advanced 3DGS codecs still takes seconds, making them unsuitable for interactive applications. To systematically address this challenge, we propose SpeedyGS, a Content-Aware 3DGS Compressor that separately optimizes the structural formation and statistical coding. First, in structural formation, we jointly optimize adaptive quantization and pruning under a unified rate-distortion objective, where the rate term is replaced by a lightweight rate proxy that estimates entropy coding cost of the next stage, thereby efficiently regulating Gaussian density and precision to yield a compact scene representation. Then, in the statistical coding phase, Gaussian geometry is converted into sparse octree tokens and subsequently undergoes multi-stage coding, while Gaussian attributes are serialized into a 1D token stream for entropy coding via a complexity-controllable local autoregressive model. SpeedyGS achieves a favorable balance among optimization efficiency, compression performance, decoding latency, and rendering speed. Compared to vanilla 3DGS, SpeedyGS achieves up to 160$\times$ model size reduction with negligible quality degradation across common datasets. Compared to state-of-the-art compression methods, it also offers significantly faster decoding and accelerates optimization by 9$\times$ on consumer-grade hardware. To further reduce decoding overhead, the statistical coding stage also supports channel-wise, fixed-length coding for Gaussian as a simpler alternative, enabling SpeedyGS to better adapt to the underlying application and reduce decoding latency to nearly zero.

This work presents an examination of the main interactions between grid-following (GFL) and grid-forming (GFM) voltage source converters (VSCs) and synchronous generators (SGs), capturing the dynamics of a real power grid and pointing out the limitations of considering an ideal one for stability studies. Eigenvalue trajectories and participation factors are studied to perform in-depth small-signal analyses. Specifically, the GFL and GFM converters are compared in different grid strength scenarios by varying their rating powers and the grid short circuit ratio. Then, time-domain simulations of the non-linear and the developed linear systems are run to validate the mathematical findings from the stability analysis. The results reveal that the stability of VSCs-dominated grids, either in GFL or GFM mode, is strongly affected by both the grid strength and the VSC power, due to the coupling between the VSC control and the SGs.

We propose a new task, audio diarization. The motivation is that there are applications, such as audio monitoring in an unknown environment, where initially the sound event classes to be recognized are unknown. For such a scenario, we propose to first localize in time relevant sound events and to classify them, e.g., by comparing with known event classes, in a second step. This contribution is dedicated to the first step, which we call audio diarization, as it is reminiscent of the speaker diarization stage that precedes and simplifies the second stage, speech recognition, in multi-talker conversational speech processing. In this contribution, we define audio diarization as detecting onset and offset times of sound events with overlap for an open set of classes and without user prompts. We show how a speaker diarization system can be adjusted for audio diarization and propose an evaluation setup. Compared to a closed-set sound event detection system, the proposed system achieves similar performance with the additional ability to detect novel sounds.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising approach to learning wireless policies efficiently by leveraging topology prior and incorporating relational inductive biases. However, when the optimal policy is not permutation equivariant (PE), conventional GNNs suffer from mismatched inductive biases, leading to degraded performance or poor generalizability. This issue arises in wireless tasks with expected objectives, such as channel estimation and end-to-end (E2E) precoding, where the PE property of the optimal policy depends on the underlying channel distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel positional attention-based GNN to learn permutation nonequivariant policies efficiently. The core idea is to incorporate relative positions of vertices into the attention mechanism via an embedding function, enabling the GNNs to capture asymmetric relationships. Consequently, the proposed GNN can represent permutation non-equivariant functions, while retaining high learning efficiency and size generalizability through parameter sharing. We consider channel estimation and E2E precoding as case studies, and prove that their policies are PE to users but not to antennas under spatially correlated channels. We employ the proposed GNN to learn the policies, where the embedding function is designed based on the channel covariance matrix. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed GNN outperforms existing channel estimation and E2E precoding methods, requires fewer samples for training, and can be generalized to systems with different numbers of antennas and users.

We propose an interference-free multi-backscatter device (BD) access scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based symbiotic backscatter communication (SBC). Specifically, we introduce an orthogonal frequency-code spread (OFC) scheme in which the transmitter reserves empty subcarriers for BDs to incorporate their information through frequency shifting, which effectively suppresses direct-link interference (DLI). Since enabling simultaneous access over shared subcarriers introduces inter-backscatter device interference (IBDI), a blockwise orthogonal code-spread is applied to assign each BD to a unique codeword, thereby mitigating IBDI with orthogonal transmissions of all BD signals in the code domain. We develop a non-coherent energy detector whose performance is analyzed in terms of average probability of missed detection (PMD) and sum-rate under Rayleigh fading. The simulation results validate the OFC scheme and demonstrate low PMD values and high spectral efficiency compared to conventional code-assisted multiple-BD access schemes.

Generative fixed-filter active noise control (GFANC) effectively attenuates noise with diverse frequency characteristics through the combination of sub control filters. However, it does not incorporate the spatial information of the noise source, which limits its performance, particularly in reverberant environments. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel spatial-frequency cued GFANC (SF-GFANC) method that exploits both three-dimensional (3D) spatial and frequency information of the noise source. Specifically, a multi-task convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) is designed to estimate the source distance, elevation angle, and azimuth angle as spatial cues, while predicting the combination weights of sub control filters as frequency cues. These spatial-frequency cues jointly guide the generation of the appropriate control filter. In addition, a theoretical analysis of the optimal control filter in reverberant environments is presented, highlighting the importance of 3D spatially conditioned control filter design. Evaluations using both simulated and measured acoustic paths demonstrate that the CRNN is robust to unseen acoustic environments and noise types. Furthermore, the results confirm that SF-GFANC outperforms representative ANC algorithms when handling noise sources across diverse 3D locations and frequency characteristics in reverberant environments.

We optimise bidirectional OESCL-band coherent transmission under total fibre power constraints using a GPU-accelerated boundary-value Raman solver and launch-power optimisation. While no gain is observed without power constraints, for an 18-dBm limit 3-span transmission reversing the O-band direction increases aggregate capacity by up to 24.5%

Limited-angle digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) reconstructs a volume from a few low-dose projections over a narrow arc. At a representative nine-view, $25^{\circ}$ protocol more than 98% of image space is unmeasured, so a learned prior must supply structure in the missing wedge. Conditional diffusion priors achieve strong perceptual quality here but leave three clinical obstacles: inexact data consistency, unlocalized hallucination, and uncalibrated uncertainty. We enforce measurements exactly by replacing the per-step proximal update of a conditional diffusion sampler with exact Euclidean projection onto the data-consistent set, computed via an $m$-dimensional dual system with a one-time Gram matrix $AA^{\top}$ factorization. This projection costs 4.5 ms per step (a $248\times$ speedup) and drives the data residual to the double-precision floor ($2.4\times10^{-13}$). We prove it is the $\rho\to0$ limit of the proximal step, provide a no-harm theorem, and show that exactly consistent sample ensembles have variance supported on null($A$). Thus, the mean's entire error lies in the unmeasured subspace covered by the uncertainty map. On patient-derived breast phantoms, this improves fidelity at no depth-resolution cost. Conversely, a proximal step applied post-update degrades quality, isolating the consistency step's placement as decisive. Isotonic recalibration brings the ensemble spread to a calibrated error scale (expected calibration error $0.029\to0.008$; standardized error $4.7\to0.96$), ranking errors better than the pure prior. We also repair a 20.3% adjoint mismatch in a deployed projector via a materialized operator of record. This is the first data-consistent, uncertainty-calibrated learned reconstruction for limited-angle DBT. The solver naturally relaxes to discrepancy-ball and maximum-a-posteriori modes for noisy measurements.

The growing supply of retired electric vehicle batteries presents an opportunity for second-life stationary energy storage, but assembling heterogeneous retired cells into reliable packs is challenging due to substantial variation in capacity, DC internal resistance (DCIR), and self-discharge. This paper proposes a robust optimization framework for cell-to-pack assembly of second-life batteries. A topology-screening stage first identifies minimum-cell series-parallel configurations satisfying inverter and energy requirements, reducing the dimensionality of the subsequent assignment problem. For each candidate topology, a mixed-integer linear program selects cells and assigns them along the series string, enforcing power, voltage, and energy requirements as hard constraints while minimizing a normalized, weighted sum of DCIR spread, capacity spread, and self-discharge imbalance. Additionally, measurement uncertainty in capacity and DCIR is modeled as bounded intervals to guarantee feasibility under worst-case parameter deviations. The framework is evaluated on four heterogeneous inventories for a 10 kW/10 kWh stationary backup application. The proposed method satisfies all feasibility requirements in every case, while single-metric sorting heuristics each fail on at least one inventory. Relative to the best single-metric baseline by objective value, it reduces the normalized mismatch objective by 76-87%, demonstrating that jointly optimizing cell matching with application-level feasibility requirements improves heterogeneous second-life pack assembly under screening uncertainty.

Single-shot fringe projection profilometry (FPP) networks that regress depth directly can exploit a shape-prior shortcut, recovering depth from object boundaries rather than from fringe phase. On a photorealistic synthetic benchmark (15,600 fringe images, 50 objects at 1.5-2.1 m standoff), the best such UNet baseline plateaus at 14.54 mm object mean absolute error (MAE), and neither more data nor more capacity removes the shortcut, because neither changes the hypothesis space the optimizer searches. We introduce PhiCalNet, which outputs a wrapped-phase representation $(\sin\phi, \cos\phi)$ and maps it to depth through a fixed differentiable calibration layer, removing the shape-prior solution architecturally rather than by a loss penalty. Because the single-shot mapping is non-injective without fringe order, PhiCalNet takes the fringe order as auxiliary input, an assumption a sensitivity analysis shows tolerates realistic decoding error; a physics-informed (PINN) baseline with the same physics as a soft penalty yields no gain, isolating the architectural choice as the operative factor. PhiCalNet reduces object MAE 3.3x to 4.46 mm, its residual confined to 0.103% of pixels at the $\pm\pi$ wrap discontinuity, and a three-frame extension reaches 1.16 mm. Two checks agree: interpretability makes phase the most decodable internal feature, and pixel-wise conformal uncertainty quantification, to our knowledge the first for FPP, localizes error at the same discontinuity, where rejecting the top 5% of pixels by snapshot disagreement cuts root-mean-square error by 64% versus 3.5% for the baseline.

Language identification is an important step toward integrating endangered Australian Aboriginal languages (AALs) into speech technologies supporting language revitalisation and digital inclusion. However, extreme data scarcity limits model performance. Transfer learning from high-resource languages shows promise but often suffers from catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new languages. Continual learning (CL) can mitigate this issue, though it remains challenging with very limited data. To address this, we propose two hybrid continual learning methods: Replay Augmented Elastic Weight Consolidation and Constraint Guided Knowledge Distillation to adapt pretrained speech models for AAL identification while preserving previously learned knowledge. Experiments on Warlpiri, Dalabon and Dharawal show that the proposed methods outperform fine-tuning and existing CL baselines, improving adaptation to multiple AALs while maintaining performance on previously learnt high-resource languages.

Sensor-rich data-driven applications increasingly use Bayesian approaches to infer latent states of dynamic systems from noisy sensor measurements and physical models. Yet the computation of the likelihood remains an essential bottleneck for accurate posteriors and performant inference. This paper presents a Bayesian filtering technique that uses processor-native uncertainty tracking for both uncertainty propagation and inference. The technique implements deterministic hierarchical importance restructuring through a native operation, giving deterministic latency and bounded memory use for arbitrary models written as program code. Benchmarks across three nonlinear state-space systems compare the approach against particle filters and Monte-Carlo-based likelihood estimators. The technique enables deterministic approximate filtering with as high as 805$\times$ average speedup against direct Monte Carlo work at matched result quality for model evaluation, and Pareto-dominant accuracy-latency trade-offs for posterior inference while remaining competitive in RMSE with baseline particle filters.

This article establishes a new numerically viable technique for solving a class of constrained, nonconvex, continuous-time optimal control problems (OCPs) for linear systems that commonly arise in aerial and aerospace applications. The lossless convexification technique is employed to translate the original nonconvex OCP with annular control magnitude constraints into a convex problem, and then by finitely parametrizing the control space with piecewise constant functions, an efficient numerical approach is established that guarantees exact solutions while ensuring the satisfaction of an uncountable family of constraints over a compact time interval. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated on a spacecraft landing problem involving three degrees of freedom (DoF), underscoring its potential for real-world aerospace guidance and control tasks.

This paper investigates the control of discrete-time linear time-invariant (LTI) systems subject to incomplete and corrupted measurements. Specifically, we focus on designing a Linear Quadratic Gaussian (LQG) controller without relying on explicit state estimation. By leveraging minimum variance duality, our approach allows the current control input to be represented as a linear function of available measurements and previously applied inputs, successfully reducing the task to a tractable deterministic optimization problem. We provide theoretical justification for this framework and demonstrate its practical effectiveness through numerical experiments.

Decentralized gradient descent (DGD) is widely used for solving distributed optimization problems over networks of agents. While its convergence properties are well understood, less is known about the communication and computation resources required to attain a prescribed accuracy. In this paper, we study DGD from a resource-aware perspective and characterize the communication-computation budget required to attain a target error level. We develop a bottleneck-centric framework in which different factors dominate the optimization dynamics at different error scales. Specifically, we identify operating regimes governed by initialization, objective heterogeneity and network connectivity, gradient noise, and communication noise. To capture these effects, we introduce two fundamental quantities: the gradient-Diversity-to-Network-connectivity Ratio (DNR) and the Gradient-to-Communication-noise Ratio (GCR). We show that these quantities determine the sequence of bottlenecks encountered during optimization and the corresponding budget-optimal operating strategy. Using a multi-stage analysis, we derive optimal stepsize selections and explicit budget-complexity bounds that quantify the budget resources required to attain a prescribed accuracy. The resulting expressions reveal how the overall budget decomposes into contributions associated with successive bottlenecks and provide insight into the fundamental tradeoffs among objective heterogeneity, network connectivity, gradient noise, and communication noise.

Many recently proposed Calderbank-Shor-Steane (CSS) quantum low-density parity-check (QLDPC) codes have sparse decoding graphs, enabling syndrome-based belief propagation (BP) decoding at low complexity. Their construction, however, often results in properties that impair BP performance, such as short cycles and degeneracy. In this work, we propose a general framework for introducing auxiliary variable nodes (AVNs) and auxiliary check nodes (ACNs) into the decoding graph of CSS codes, compatible with the standard stabilizer measurement framework. This provides an additional degree of freedom in the design of the decoding graph itself and can be used to tackle the aforementioned shortcomings. We show that recently proposed techniques, 4-cycle removal and subcode ensemble decoding, can be interpreted as instances of this framework. For 4-cycle removal, we find that the gains depend strongly on the BP iteration count and check-node message scaling. Building on this framework, we further propose a graph-derived subcode ensemble decoder and demonstrate under circuit-level noise that it substantially reduces the per-round logical error rate compared with BP on the corresponding 4-cycle-free decoding graph.

We prove new necessary and sufficient conditions for uniform asymptotic stability under arbitrary switching of two-dimensional switched homogeneous systems with a finite number of subsystems using a worst-case switching analysis. The novelty of our approach is in its explicit nature, which allows us to then study in detail the codimension-one bifurcations of stability of the origin in switched linear systems and further conclude new local and global stability results for certain classes of nonlinear switched systems. In particular, we formulate an analogue of Lyapunov's indirect method for $\mathcal{C}^{1}$ switched nonlinear systems and derive a new method for determining the existence of a bounded basin of attraction for a class of switched nonlinear systems.

Current analog complexity theory, built on the General-Purpose Analog Computer (GPAC) model and polynomial ODEs, allows unbounded state variables -- an assumption that is physically unrealistic for chemical reaction networks and other laboratory-scale analog computers. We develop a bounded analog complexity theory in which all state variables remain in compact intervals and physical time (wall-clock time) is the only diverging resource. Our main technical contribution is bounded surrogate compilation, a compilation framework that transforms unbounded polynomial ODE systems into bounded ones while preserving computational limits and time-to-precision guarantees. We prove that if a system is compiled into a bounded system through our algorithm, the wall-clock time of the compiled system is polynomial in the arc length and physical time of the original system. We exhibit concrete constructions demonstrating fine-grained bounded time complexity -- a tunable polynomial-degree family, a Lambert-$W$-based system achieving $\Theta(r\log r)$ time-to-precision (where $r$ is the desired precision parameter, in nats: $|x(t)-\alpha|<e^{-r}$), and an iterated-logarithm tower realizing arbitrarily high complexity classes -- all for the task of computing the constant 1. We show that bounded GPACs are closed under exponentiation ($\alpha^\beta$) with time complexity equal to the harder input, and that the full GPAC-to-CRN compilation pipeline preserves time complexity class via a low-pass filter analysis of readout modules.

Radar sensing is increasingly used in mobile systems because it operates reliably under poor lighting, adverse weather, and privacy-sensitive settings where cameras and LiDAR often fail. However, most existing radar SLAM systems estimate motion through scan matching on discretized radar heatmaps, which breaks geometric continuity and fails to capture key radar sensing properties, often leading to unstable pose estimation and degraded mapping in regenerate or dynamically changing environments. We present DiffRadar, a real-time radar SLAM system that models radar observations as a differentiable, physics-aware Gaussian field rather than discrete scans. DiffRadar represents the scene as anisotropic Gaussian primitives and renders radar measurements in range-azimuth and Doppler-azimuth spaces through a differentiable radar forward model, enabling joint optimization of robot pose and scene structure directly from radar measurements. We implement DiffRadar on commodity FMCW radar hardware and evaluate it on both the public Radarize benchmark and a controlled stress-test suite that targets common radar SLAM failure modes, including corridor degeneracy, motion regime transitions, dynamic clutter, and long-horizon loop closures. DiffRadar achieves substantial reductions in trajectory error on the benchmark, with especially large gains under feature-poor corridor motion, while more than doubling map consistency and maintaining real-time performance at 70 FPS. These results show that modeling radar observations directly in the signal domain enables substantially more robust and consistent radar-only SLAM for mobile platforms.

Quadrotors flying in tight formations are severely affected by turbulent aerodynamic interactions, such as downwash, that can cause catastrophic collisions if left unmodeled. To compensate for these effects, we propose a physics-informed residual dynamics learning framework that captures complex aerodynamic interactions while ensuring the joint multi-quadrotor system remains differentially flat. We leverage this preserved flatness to design a computationally efficient feedback linearization controller that is easily tunable with linear control techniques and cancels aerodynamic disturbances via feedforward compensation. Hardware experiments demonstrate our framework reduces average tracking errors by 31% compared to nominal baselines. Crucially, our lightweight approach matches the tracking performance of state-of-the-art nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) while requiring an order of magnitude less computation. We are the first to show that stable, tight formation flight can be achieved with under 30 seconds of training data and a 5ms loop rate, unlocking high-fidelity aerodynamic compensation for compute-constrained flight stacks.

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) in open-world environments remains challenging due to limited generalization and interpretability. Recent approaches based on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduce textual reasoning for quality prediction, yet their judgments rely heavily on semantically biased internal representations, making them insensitive to low-level perceptual degradations. We propose IQA-T1, a tool-based visual evidence reasoning framework that augments MLLM reasoning with explicit perceptual observations. During inference, the model autonomously invokes specialized analysis tools to generate structured visual evidence, such as noise residual maps, gradient statistics, and frequency spectra, which are progressively integrated into the reasoning process. To support this paradigm, we construct Q-Tool, a dataset containing 11k multimodal reasoning chains grounded in tool-generated evidence. Extensive experiments on seven IQA benchmarks show that IQA-T1 achieves the best overall performance across datasets while producing interpretable and evidence-grounded quality assessments. Code and dataset are available at this https URL.

Although vast amounts of data, such as audio signal spectra, are naturally represented using complex numbers, conventional machine learning methods often simplify complex-domain problems by employing frameworks designed for real-valued variables. While this simplification offers computational benefits, it discards structural information regarding the inherent relationship between amplitude and phase. In this paper, we propose a novel Boltzmann machine (BM), named PolarBM, capable of naturally handling complex-valued variables in the polar coordinate (i.e., an amplitude-phase representation). PolarBM defines a probability density function for complex variables in which the phase explicitly depends on the amplitude, thereby capturing the physically important relationships of complex-valued signals. Furthermore, to process audio signals in accordance with human auditory perception, we propose LogPolarBM, which models amplitude on a logarithmic scale. This extension yields a flexible conditional probability density function, a power-weighted noncentral complex Gaussian (PW-NCCG) distribution, whose marginal amplitude distribution encompasses the Rice, Nakagami, and noncentral chi distributions as special cases. For practical applications, we also introduce the restricted variants of these proposed models: PolarRBM and LogPolarRBM. Experimental results demonstrate that by explicitly modeling the dependency between amplitude and phase, the proposed RBMs achieve superior modeling accuracy compared to conventional models, including deep neural networks. Although our experiments focus on audio signals, the utility of the proposed BMs is not limited to audio applications; their potential extends widely across various fields of science and engineering that involve complex-valued data, such as wireless communications and quantum mechanics.

The Forward-Forward (FF) algorithm trains each layer locally, so that a scalar goodness - the sum of squared activations - is high on real inputs and low on contrastive ones, with activations normalized between layers. Both choices are usually treated as heuristics. Under an explicit generative model they are not: the squared goodness is the sufficient statistic of a likelihood-ratio test between two zero-mean populations differing in scale, and the FF threshold is its boundary. It generalizes: anisotropic populations yield a Mahalanobis goodness, the plain square being its isotropic case; heavy-tailed populations yield a saturating statistic whose slope is a posterior precision - divisive normalization - with bounded evidence and an advantage only under aggregation. The same lens characterizes the inter-layer normalization: it must remove the length while preserving per-coordinate energy, explaining a depth collapse we observe under unit-norm normalization; and the pairwise objective admits a scale-inflation shortcut that a whitened goodness removes.

Wireless aerial virtual reality (VR) aims to provide immersive access to large-scale scenes, but high-resolution view generation and delivery are jointly constrained by limited bandwidth, latency, and power. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) can reduce the payload by rendering views from compact pose information, yet its geometry errors may cause severe VR quality degradation. Existing channel-aware or pixel-level resource allocation schemes fail to capture such geometry-sensitive distortion. To address this issue, this paper proposes GeoFovea-GS as a geometry-aware cross-layer framework for communication-efficient wireless aerial VR. A foveated geometry-aware distortion metric is developed to characterize photometric rendering error, geometric inconsistency, and view-dependent perceptual importance in a unified form. Based on this metric, the joint selection of pose-only 3DGS rendering and image/tile correction transmission is formulated as a cross-layer optimization problem under wireless constraints. A lightweight value-of-information scheduler is further developed to allocate communication resources to regions that are both geometry-critical and perceptually important. Experiments on real-world 3DGS scenes demonstrate that GeoFovea-GS achieves superior immersive rendering quality with substantially reduced transmission cost.

The pinching-antenna system (PASS) uses dielectric particles along a low-loss waveguide as reconfigurable passive radiators. Existing analyses conclude that the in-waveguide attenuation is negligible at low frequencies and millimeter wave bands; we show this fails at terahertz (THz), where realizable waveguide losses are dramatically larger. We develop a unified wideband THz-PASS propagation model integrating in-waveguide attenuation, atmospheric absorption, molecular re-radiation noise, and beam squint. Closed-form results follow: a band-averaged coherence factor; a cluster-center placement satisfying a band-edge SINR equalization condition; an associated placement-inversion threshold; and a proposed \emph{Switched-Feed PASS} (SF-PASS) architecture in which a centrally located radio-frequency switch routes the signal among multiple waveguide segments, with a closed-form insertion-loss payoff threshold. Numerical evaluation at the best PASS-compatible THz operating point shows that SF-PASS substantially outperforms single-feed PASS in spectral efficiency and is competitive with a large-scale antenna array at much lower hardware costs.

The paper introduces the Internet of Agentic Things (IoAT), an architectural framework that integrates agentic AI, IoT, cyber-physical systems, Physical AI, edge computing, and digital twins into a unified closed-loop orchestration framework. The proposed architecture consists of cloud, edge/fog, and physical IoT layers connected through autonomous AI agents that perceive, reason, coordinate, and actuate across distributed cyber-physical environments. The paper formalizes IoAT as a coupled workflow-control problem with nested strategic and tactical decision making using a hylomorphic dynamic programming framework that links agentic planning with physical execution. Smart-building orchestration is presented as a representative use case, and key research challenges related to safety, security, governance, resilience, and trustworthy deployment are discussed.

Pinching antenna systems (PASS) employing dielectric waveguides have recently emerged as a promising flexible antenna architecture for high-frequency wireless communications. While prior work has focused primarily on millimeter-wave regimes, extending PASS to the terahertz (THz) band introduces distinct electromagnetic phenomena that invalidate conventional modeling assumptions. This paper develops the first analytical framework for THz-PASS that integrates in-waveguide propagation attenuation, evanescent coupling via coupled-mode theory, and THz-specific free-space effects including molecular absorption and its re-radiation noise. Using this model, we benchmark THz-PASS against conventional phased arrays under identical propagation scenarios. Our comparative evaluation reveals that THz-PASS achieves effective gains in spectral efficiency through proximity exploitation, making it particularly well-suited for confined and linear deployment topologies.

This paper proposes a superimposed transmission strategy for cooperative cellular and cell-free massive MIMO systems. By classifying users into near and far, the base station transmits an additional data symbol for each near user, superimposed on the signals from distributed access points. Successive interference cancellation is employed at near-user receivers to decode both symbols. The proposed strategy achieves the highest peak spectral efficiency while maintaining fairness at the cell edge, thereby outperforming all the existing network configurations in system capacity.

Encrypted control lets a cloud coordinate a fleet of agents on fully homomorphically encrypted state, keeping their positions and commands private. The approximate scheme for real-valued control, CKKS, returns decryptions that carry the encryption noise, a key-recovery leak; the loop must decrypt to actuate, so the leak is unavoidable. Yet the security of approximate FHE is studied statically, encrypted control assumes an honest-but-curious cloud, and persistent-threat games never reach inside the cryptosystem. We model the loop's security under an advanced persistent threat as a two-phase game, passive reconnaissance then active manipulation, separated by a measured residual detector that sees only the manipulation. The passive phase reduces to the known flooding tradeoff; the active defense is re-keying, not bootstrapping, since only re-keying resets accumulated leakage. The active phase is a detection-evasion timing game: overt manipulation is caught, so the rational adversary stays stealthy, and at its Stackelberg equilibrium the defender re-keys on the laziest cadence that denies it, set by the control-theoretic fragility of the graph topology. The marginally-stable graph must re-key far more often than the well-connected one. A three-way tension among FHE precision, control accuracy, and re-key cadence sets where this game lives, between a securability floor and a static-suffices ceiling. The efficient secure point is that window, where re-keying is the price of precision efficiency. More broadly, security for an approximate cryptosystem in a feedback loop is a dynamic game whose defender's move is the scheme's own refresh, applying beyond control to any system that must repeatedly decrypt to act.

Scenario-based model predictive control (SBMPC) is a variant of model predictive control (MPC) that explicitly accounts for uncertainty by optimizing control actions over multiple predicted scenarios. However, its computational complexity increases rapidly with the number of scenarios and prediction horizon, limiting is applicability to real-time planning and control. This paper presents a learning-accelerated Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm for efficiently solving SBMPC problems by leveraging parallel computing and Moreau envelope learning, while maintaining high solution accuracy. We reformulate the SBMPC problems into consensus forms that can be decomposed via ADMM, separating the scenario-dependent dynamics from non-anticipativity constraints and enabling parallel updates across scenarios and time steps. Building on this decomposition, we utilize existing learning-to-optimize schemes, which leverages Moreau envelope learning of the cost function to accelerate the primal update in ADMM, thereby reducing computation time. The proposed framework is evaluated on a microgrid energy management problem subject to load and renewable generation uncertainties. Comparisons with IPOPT and MadNLP, popular and modern nonlinear programming solvers, demonstrate substantial computational speedups while maintaining reliable closed-loop control performance.

This study introduces a unified control framework for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) fitted with a pan-tilt (PT) camera, intended to perform an end-to-end mission spanning from initial target detection to accurate terminal engagement. The proposed system employs a three-phase strategy: a vision-based target acquisition phase, an NMPC-based tracking phase, and a terminal guidance phase. During tracking, the framework uses an Unscented Kalman Filter (UKF) to fuse YOLO-based visual detections with inertial measurements, enabling robust target state estimation under unknown dynamics. To ensure reliable visual contact, we introduce a constraint-aware Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) strategy that incorporates Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to explicitly prevent UAV self-occlusion -- a common limitation in fixed-wing tracking. Upon satisfying terminal engagement conditions, the system seamlessly transitions control to a quaternion-based Biased Proportional Navigation Guidance (BPNG) law, enforcing precise impact angle constraints. High-fidelity simulations demonstrate that the framework achieves stable, robust tracking and accurate terminal interception while strictly respecting the vehicle's dynamic limits and camera field-of-view constraints.

Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) holds great potential for robot swarms, but the black-box nature of neural policies complicates strategic analysis, limiting multi-robot applications. Furthermore, complex swarm behaviors can surprisingly emerge from simple rewards without explicit aggregation incentives. Unveiling the mechanisms behind this emergence is critical, but the disconnection between simple rewards and collective behaviors exacerbates interpretability challenges. This paper aims to reveal the hidden mechanisms in this process. We propose a two-stage EEC (\LinkIII) explanatory framework. This includes a novel analytical tool called the Agent Response Map (ARM), which reveals agents' decision-making patterns across space and identifies regions of aggregation and avoidance. ARM reveals that the robots implicitly learn the geometric fields of the environment and utilize these structures as desired targets for coordinated movement. We validate this finding across two distinct tasks: a cooperative multi-robot shape assembly and a competitive predator-prey pursuit-evasion. 1) In the cooperative task, ARM identifies the unoccupied target interior as the desired destination for robot navigation. As the center becomes occupied, this target region automatically shifts toward the boundary, demonstrating the robots' capacity to autonomously explore unoccupied areas. 2) In the competitive task, ARM surprisingly identifies the boundary of the predators' Voronoi diagram as the convergence destination for prey agents. Together, these two tasks demonstrate the capability of ARM to discover the hidden geometric structures underlying MARL policies in robot swarms.

Neuromorphic computing has so far been driven predominantly by machine-learning workloads, yet its underlying properties also make it particularly well suited to combinatorial optimization problems expressed in Ising or QUBO form. While neuromorphic Ising solvers have been demonstrated, how a given problem should be formulated to best suit neuromorphic dynamics has received far less attention. Maximum-likelihood (ML) channel decoding can be expressed as an Ising/QUBO problem, and two distinct formulations already exist in the quantum-annealing literature: a squared-penalty formulation that uses few spins but produces dense intra-check couplings, and a chain-product formulation that improves locality at the cost of additional auxiliary spins. Both place the ML codeword at the ground state under sufficient constraint enforcement, but they have not been compared under the constraints that neuromorphic hardware imposes. This work provides the first systematic side-by-side comparison of QUBO/Ising formulations of ML decoding for linear codes. We show that the two formulations impose fundamentally different tradeoffs in neuron count, synaptic density, locality, and convergence behavior. The preferred formulation is inseparable from the choice of solver, and the two must be considered jointly. Finally, we show that ground-state correctness alone is an insufficient design criterion, and that signal processing tasks should ideally be co-formulated with their neuromorphic hardware models if neuromorphic computing is to extend into the receiver pipeline.

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate multi-step engineering and informatics workflows, yet they rarely ask how much effort a task actually requires. They often follow a maximum-context-first strategy--re-reading files and dependencies they have already seen--turning a one-line edit into a small code-base audit. We argue the missing capability is task-aware execution-scope estimation: judging a task's difficulty, the information it truly needs, and the shortest reliable path before committing budget. We formalize minimum-sufficient execution and the Agent Cognitive Redundancy Ratio (ACRR), and propose E3 (Estimate, Execute, Expand): the agent estimates an initial operating point, executes a minimum viable path, and expands scope only when verification fails. On MSE-Bench--a deterministic benchmark of 121 edits in a capability-controlled simulator--E3 matches the strongest baseline's 100% success while cutting cost by 85%, tokens by 91%, and inspected files by 92%, and further beats a strong adaptive retrieval baseline by 16%; the gains survive held-out instruction wording and essentially every cost weighting. A companion real-model harness (LLM-Case) corroborates the effect on a live gpt-4o agent editing a real open-source library, with every candidate patch graded by actually running the project's real pytest suite against a measured oracle: the over-reading is milder but real, and E3 is the leanest and fastest policy at comparable task success--its one shortfall a provider rate-limit, not a wrong edit. We frame this as a controlled probe of execution redundancy, not a measurement of any deployed agent, and position task-aware execution as a step toward engineering-grounded AI (EGAI)--agents whose effort is anchored in the engineering reality of the task. We release the framework and benchmark.

Efficient trajectory generation is crucial for autonomous systems; however, current numerical methods often struggle to handle periodic behaviors effectively, particularly when the onboard sensors require equidistant temporal sampling. This paper introduces a novel mixed Bernstein-Fourier approximation framework tailored explicitly for optimal motion planning. Our proposed methodology leverages the uniform convergence properties of Bernstein polynomials for nonperiodic behaviors while effectively capturing periodic dynamics through the Fourier series. Theoretical results are established, including uniform convergence proofs for approximations of functions, derivatives, and integrals, as well as detailed error bound analyses. We further introduce a regulated least squares approach for determining approximation coefficients, enhancing numerical stability and practical applicability. Within an optimal control context, we establish the feasibility and consistency of approximated solutions to their continuous counterparts. We also extend the covector mapping theorem, providing theoretical guarantees for approximating dual variables crucial in verifying the necessary optimality conditions from Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. Numerical examples illustrate the method's superior performance, demonstrating substantial improvements in computational efficiency and precision in scenarios with complex periodic constraints and dynamics. Our mixed Bernstein-Fourier methodology thus presents a robust, theoretically grounded, and computationally efficient approach for advanced optimal trajectory planning in autonomous systems.

The identification of nonlinear systems is a frequent task in digital signal processing. Such nonlinear systems may be grouped into many sub-classes, whereby numerous nonlinear real-world systems can be approximated as bilinear (BL) models. Therefore, various optimum and adaptive BL filters have been introduced in recent years. Moreover, in many applications, such as communications and radar, complex-valued (CV) BL systems in combination with CV signals may occur. Hence, in this work, we investigate the extension of real-valued (RV) BL filters to CV BL filters. First, we derive CV BL filters by applying two or four RV BL filters, and compare them with respect to their computational complexity and performance. Second, we introduce novel fully CV BL filters, such as the CV BL Wiener filter (C-BWF), the CV BL least squares (C-BLS) filter, the CV BL least mean squares (C-BLMS) filter, the CV BL normalized least mean squares (C-BNLMS) filter, and the CV BL recursive least squares (C-BRLS) filter. Finally, these filters are applied to identify CV multiple-input-single-output (MISO) systems and CV Hammerstein models.

In recent years, security has emerged as a critical aspect of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. While significant research has focused on secure communications, particularly in ensuring physical layer security, the issue of sensing security has received comparatively less attention. This paper addresses the sensing security problem in ISAC, particularly under the threat of multi-intercept adversaries. We consider a realistic scenario in which the sensing target is an advanced electronic reconnaissance aircraft capable of employing multiple signal interception techniques, such as power detection (PD) and cyclostationary analysis (CA). To evaluate sensing security under such sophisticated threats, we analyze two critical features of the transmitted signal: (i) power distribution and (ii) cyclic spectrum. Further, we introduce a novel ergodic cyclic spectrum metric which leverages the intrinsic mathematical structure of cyclostationary signals to more comprehensively characterize their behavior. Building on this analysis, we formulate a new ISAC design problem that explicitly considers sensing security, and we develop a low-complexity, efficient optimization approach to solve it. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed metric is both effective and insightful, and that our ISAC design significantly enhances sensing security performance in the presence of multi-intercept threats.

Understanding the performance of multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems under imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) remains a critical challenge in next-generation wireless networks. In this context, accurate statistical modeling of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) is essential for enabling tractable performance analysis of multi-user systems. This paper presents an improved statistical approximation of the SINR for downlink (DL) MU-MIMO systems with imperfect CSIT. The proposed model retains the analytical simplicity of existing approaches (e.g., Gamma-based approximations) while overcoming their limitations, particularly the underestimation of SINR variance. We evaluate the proposed approximation in the context of Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA)-enabled MIMO DL systems with outdated CSIT. The results demonstrate excellent accuracy across a wide range of system configurations, including varying numbers of users, antennas, and degrees of CSIT staleness.

Spatial audio enhances immersion by reproducing 3D sound fields, with Ambisonics offering a scalable format for this purpose. While first-order Ambisonics (FOA) notably facilitates hardware-efficient acquisition and storage of sound fields as compared to high-order Ambisonics (HOA), its low spatial resolution limits realism, highlighting the need for Ambisonics upscaling (AU) as an approach for increasing the order of Ambisonics signals. In this work we propose DiffAU, a cascaded AU method that leverages recent developments in diffusion models combined with novel adaptation to spatial audio to generate 3rd order Ambisonics from FOA. By learning data distributions, DiffAU provides a principled approach that rapidly and reliably reproduces HOA in various settings. Experiments in anechoic conditions with multiple speakers, show strong objective and perceptual performance.

Deep learning-based neural receivers offer promising physical-layer solutions for next-generation wireless systems. We propose an axial self-attention transformer neural receiver that achieves state-of-the-art Block Error Rate (BLER) performance with significantly improved computational efficiency during inference and large-scale training. By factorizing attention operations along temporal and spectral axes, the proposed architecture reduces computational complexity from $O((TF)^2)$ to $O(T^2F+TF^2)$, yielding substantially fewer floating-point operations and attention matrix multiplications per transformer block. Experimental validation under 3GPP Clustered Delay Line (CDL) channels demonstrates consistent performance gains across varying mobility scenarios. Under non-line-of-sight conditions, our proposed axial neural receiver outperforms global self-attention and convolutional neural receiver baselines at 10% BLER and 1% BLER respectively, with reduced computational complexity.

Data centers play an increasingly critical role in societal digitalization, yet their rapidly growing energy demand poses significant challenges for sustainable operation. To enhance the energy efficiency of geographically distributed data centers, this paper formulates a multi-period optimization model that captures the interdependence of electricity, heat, and data flows. The optimization of such integrated multi-domain flows inherently involves mixed-integer formulations and the access to proprietary or sensitive datasets, which correspondingly exacerbate computational complexity and raise data-privacy concerns. To address these challenges, an adaptive federated learning-to-optimization approach is proposed, accounting for the heterogeneity of datasets across distributed data centers. To safeguard privacy, cryptography techniques are leveraged in both the learning and optimization processes. A model acceptance criterion with convergence guarantee is developed to improve learning performance and filter out potentially contaminated data, while a verifiable double aggregation mechanism is further proposed to simultaneously ensure privacy and integrity of shared data during optimization. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed approach preserves the privacy and integrity of shared data, achieves near-optimal performance, and exhibits high computational efficiency, making it suitable for large-scale data center optimization under privacy constraints.

Decentralized air traffic management systems offer a scalable alternative to centralized control, but often assume high levels of cooperation. In practice, such assumptions frequently break down since airspace sectors operate independently and prioritize local objectives. We address the problem of sector overload in decentralized air traffic management by proposing a regulated decentralized protocol that models self-interested behaviors based on best response dynamics. Each sector adjusts the departure times of flights under its control to reduce its own congestion, without requiring centralized joint optimization. A tunable cooperativeness factor models the degree to which each sector accounts for overload in other sectors, while a minimal admissibility rule prevents local updates from creating new overloads. We prove that the proposed protocol satisfies a potential game structure, ensuring that best response dynamics converge to a pure Nash equilibrium under this restriction. In addition, we identify a sufficient condition under which an overload-free solution corresponds to a global minimizer of the potential function. Numerical experiments using 24 hours of European flight data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm substantially reduces overload even with only minimal cooperation between sectors, while maintaining scalability and achieving solution quality comparable to the centralized benchmark.

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

Signal processing has played, and continues to play, a fundamental role in the evolution of modern localization technologies. Localization using spatial variations in the Earth's magnetic field is no exception. It relies on signal-processing methods for statistical state inference, magnetic-field modeling, and sensor calibration. Contemporary localization techniques based on spatial variations in the magnetic field can provide decimeter-level indoor localization accuracy and outdoor localization accuracy on par with strategic-grade inertial navigation systems. This article provides a broad, high-level overview of current signal-processing principles and open research challenges in localization using spatial variations in the Earth's magnetic field. The aim is to provide the reader with an understanding of the similarities and differences among existing key technologies from a statistical signal-processing perspective. To that end, existing key technologies will be presented within a common parametric signal-model framework compatible with well-established statistical inference methods.

One of the key issues facing Direct-to-Cellular (D2C) satellite communication systems is ionospheric scintillation on the uplink and downlink, which can significantly degrade link quality. This work investigates the spatial and temporal characteristics of amplitude scintillation at D2C frequencies by scaling L-band scintillation observations from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers to bands relevant to D2C operation, including the low-band, and 3GPP's N255 and N256. These observations are then compared to scaled radio-occultation scintillation observations from the FORMOSAT-7/COSMIC-2 (F7/C2) mission, which can be used in regions that do not possess ground-based scintillation monitoring stations. As a proof of concept, five years of ground-based GNSS scintillation data from Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, together with two years of F7/C2 observations over the same region, corresponding to the ascending phase of Solar Cycle 25, are analyzed. Both space-based and ground-based observations indicate a pronounced diurnal scintillation peak between 20--22 local time, particularly during the equinoxes, with occurrence rates increasing with solar activity. Ground-based observations also reveal a strong azimuth dependence, with most scintillation events occurring on southward satellite links. The scintillation occurrence rate at the low-band is more than twice that observed at N255 and N256, highlighting the increased robustness of higher D2C bands to ionospheric scintillation. These results demonstrate how GNSS scintillation observations can be leveraged to characterize and anticipate scintillation-induced D2C link impairments, which help in D2C system design and the implementation of scintillation mitigation strategies.

Accurate probabilistic modeling of the power system restoration process is essential for resilience planning, operational decision-making, and realistic simulation of resilience events. In this work, we develop data-driven probabilistic models of the restoration process using outage data from four distribution utilities. We decompose restoration into three components: normalized restore time progression, total restoration duration, and the time to first restore. The Beta distribution provides the best fit for restore time progression, and the Uniform distribution is a defensible, parsimonious approximation for many events. Total duration is modeled as a heteroskedastic Lognormal process that scales superlinearly with event size. The time to first restore is well described by a Gamma model for moderate and large events. Together, these models provide an end-to-end stochastic model for Monte Carlo simulation, probabilistic duration forecasting, and resilience planning that moves beyond summary statistics, enabling uncertainty-aware decision support grounded in utility data.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in search-and-rescue (SAR) missions, yet continuous and reliable victim detection and localization remain challenging due to on-board hardware constraints. This paper designs an UAV-Enabled Victim Sound Detection and Localization System (called ``Sky-Ear'' for brevity) to achieve energy-efficient acoustic sensing and sound detection for SAR. Sky-Ear enables the ``ear'' of the UAV with a circular-shaped microphone array, and the array conducts continuous audio recordings during the UAV's flight. In Sky-Ear, a two-stage (Sentinel and Responder) audio processing method is developed for energy-consuming and highly reliable sound detection. In the Sentinel stage, a Masking autoencoder (MAE)-based sound detection mechanism is designed to analyze frequency-time acoustic features. For improved precision, a continuous localization method is designed by optimizing detected directions from multiple observations. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to validate the system's performance in terms of victim detection accuracy and localization error.

Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESSs) are a key enabler of the energy transition. However, they are known to exhibit significant inaccuracies in the estimation of their State of Charge (SOC). Such estimation errors can directly impact the participation of BESSs in electricity markets. In this work, we demonstrate that neglecting SOC uncertainty in battery bidding can lead to significant delivery failures, including the inability to meet promised frequency reserves. To address this risk, we investigate bidding strategies that account for SOC uncertainty. We propose three constraint-tightening optimization approaches of increasing complexity: (i) a fixed-margin formulation, (ii) an adaptive-margin optimizer, and (iii) an uncertainty-aware optimization model. The latter explicitly accounts for the decision-dependent nature of the uncertainty. Numerical results demonstrate that while all three approaches robustify against SOC uncertainty, the uncertainty-aware formulation outperforms the others in maximizing revenue while ensuring reliable frequency reserve provision. This highlights the significance of treating SOC uncertainty as an endogenous process within the operational strategy.

How difficult can it be to implement a PID controller? The answer is twofold. Implementing the PID control law is simple and computationally inexpensive. However, this basic form will not work in practical applications. The primary reason for this is the various physical limitations of the actuator. Measurement noise, different implementations depending on the various structures (P, PI, PD or PID), bumpless transfer, and varying sampling interval also result in problems rendering the basic form inoperable. PID implementation is therefore more difficult than meets the eye. This paper introduces a reference implementation of the PID controller which considers these practical issues. It includes pseudo-code, discussion of the implementation choices and simulation of carefully selected, important test cases.

We propose a robust nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) scheme for trajectory-tracking control of autonomous vehicles at the limits of handling on non-planar road surfaces. We derive the dynamics from first principles and selectively omit terms with negligible dynamic influence to maintain real-time capability. The resulting MPC with a three-dimensional (3D) dynamic single-track model integrates relevant dynamic effects directly into the prediction model and leverages them to improve prediction accuracy and therefore control performance. Even if the influence of terrain-induced vertical loads on the total acceleration potential is modeled, tire-road interactions are subject to uncertainty and disturbance. The uncertainty-aware constraint tightening scheme introduces a margin to constraint bounds to keep the vehicle controllable and stable in this environment. To validate our proposed approach, we perform high-fidelity dynamic double-track vehicle dynamics simulations on a model of a real circuit. We find that our algorithm can improve trajectory-tracking accuracy while maintaining low computation times.

Spectrum sharing forces radars to vary carrier frequency and bandwidth on a pulse-to-pulse basis within a coherent processing interval (CPI). While the resulting range-Doppler distortion is well-studied, the corresponding velocity estimation limit is not. We show that in the resolved-bin slow-time model of coherent agile-CPI processing, the effective Fisher information for radial velocity is the SNR-weighted energy of the carrier-time lever arm that survives projection out of the range and phase nuisance subspace. The carrier sequence thus sets the projection geometry, while the bandwidth sequence enters only through SNR weighting. Two consequences follow. First, the carrier sequence inflates the bound by a closed-form factor governed by the correlation between carrier offset and slow time: randomized or orthogonalized hops are nearly harmless, while ramp-correlated hops can severely degrade velocity information. Second, under matched filtering at equal pulse energy, the velocity Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) is invariant to the bandwidth sequence; a corollary recasts the output-SNR loss of agile-CPI mismatched filtering as a processing cost entering only through a per-pulse mismatch loss. The bound is verified against a brute-force Fisher matrix and Monte-Carlo maximum-likelihood estimation. The result yields a design principle: carrier hopping should be chosen not only for spectral coexistence but also to preserve the velocity-information residual.

The optimization-based alignment (OBA) approach transforms strapdown inertial navigation system (SINS) coarse alignment into a constant initial attitude estimation problem for global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-aided in-motion alignment. While existing studies mainly improve accuracy by refining attitude determination algorithms or constructing robust observation vectors, a rigorous analytical mapping from raw sensor and aiding-velocity uncertainties to attitude errors remains unavailable for fixed-length sliding-window velocity-integral OBA. To address this issue, this paper proposes a first-order attitude error propagation model. Based on the sliding-window observation model, gyroscope errors, accelerometer errors, GNSS velocity noise, and lever-arm effects are propagated to unnormalized observation-vector perturbations, which are further mapped to attitude misalignment through Davenport's q method. The model decouples systematic errors from stochastic noise and derives the corresponding deterministic attitude offsets and error covariances. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that the analytical model captures deterministic offsets and statistical spread, yielding standard-deviation ratios between 0.942 and 1.036 with empirical coverage above 99.4%. Vehicle field tests show that the predicted covariance envelopes bound the actual initial-attitude errors, with the maximum residual root-mean-square error (RMSE) below 0.00495 deg. These results validate the proposed model for coarse-alignment attitude error assessment.

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) provides a critical physical-layer security mechanism for dynamic Internet of Things (IoT) and ad hoc networks. However, the decentralized and open nature of these networks imposes two strict deployment criteria: the credential must transfer reliably across physically dispersed, heterogeneous receivers, and it must decisively reject unregistered rogue traffic. Cross-receiver hardware shifts depress the confidence of registered devices and may also place unseen rogue transmitters in high-confidence known regions under naive domain adaptation, increasing false acceptance. To address these risks, we propose CRODA-ST, a joint optimization framework that couples Discriminative Structure Anchoring (DSA) with Rejection Oriented Alignment (ROA). Within this coupled objective, DSA establishes a stable target-known semantic foundation for shifted registered devices, while ROA regularizes the open-set decision boundaries governing rejection of unseen rogue transmitters. In the canonical WiSig setting, CRODA-ST achieves an open-set classification rate (OSCR) of 0.9580 and a target-domain false positive rate of 0.0469 at a 90% true positive rate (FPR90). A controllable LoRa simulation provides a complementary diagnostic under synthesized hardware distortions. At the distinct source-calibrated deployment operating point with rho = 0.80, CRODA-ST yields a target-unknown false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0.0075 in the evaluated setting.

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) exploits transmitter-specific hardware imperfections as physicallayer identity cues for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but deep models often degrade across acquisition environments. In multi-antenna reception, antenna topology and frequencyoffset dynamics structure receiver observations, while capturedependent variation distorts target embeddings and misaligns source-trained decision boundaries. This article proposes physicsinformed structure anchoring with capture-aware prototype calibration (PISA-CAPC) to address both representation and decision mismatches. The two stages separate source representation construction from target decision correction. During source training, PISA organizes antenna tokens through a topology-guided graph, conditions propagation on CFO-derived acquisition dynamics, and applies bounded contextual residual suppression to preserve identity evidence. At deployment, unlabeled capture-aware prototype calibration (U-CAPC) estimates capture-local prototypes and recalibrates target decision scores while keeping the representation and source classifier fixed. Thus, calibration uses neither target labels nor target-domain backbone updates. On a measured WiFi benchmark with four receive antennas and ten transmitters, PISA-CAPC achieves a mean target-domain Macro-F1 of 0.9257 under a balanced transductive setting. Component ablations support complementary roles for topology-guided anchoring, CFO-conditioned modulation, reliability-aware token aggregation, contextual suppression, and capture-aware calibration. These results indicate that physically motivated representation learning can be combined with labelfree decision calibration to improve cross-environment RFFI under the evaluated protocol without changing the deployed backbone.

Frequency-domain analysis based on converter output admittance is a key tool for studying converter-driven stability in power grids. This paper presents a Python-based identification tool built on a completely open-source simulator, eliminating the need for commercial licenses such as MATLAB or PSCAD and improving configurability through an MIT-licensed stack. The identification method uses steady-state signal injection with a sinusoidal sweep, deriving frequency-domain admittance from time-domain simulations. Analytical output-admittance models are developed for both grid-forming (disturbance-observer-based) and grid-following (phase-locked-loop-based) control to verify the numerical results. The tool's results are compared against a commercial PSCAD-based alternative, demonstrating accurate admittance identification across control methods. Code and examples are available online to support reproducibility.

Much of Western classical music relies on instruments based on acoustic resonance, which produce harmonic or quasi-harmonic sounds. In contrast, since the mid-twentieth century, popular music has increasingly been produced in recording studios, where it is not bound by the constraints of harmonic sounds. In this study, we use modified MPEG-7 features to explore and characterise the evolution of noise and inharmonicity in popular music since 1961. We place this evolution in the context of other broad categories of music, including Western classical piano music, orchestral music, and musique concrète. We introduce new features that distinguish between inharmonicity caused by noise and that resulting from interactions between discrete partials. Our analysis reveals that the history of popular music since 1961 can be divided into three phases. From 1961 to 1972, inharmonicity in popular music, initially only slightly higher than in orchestral music, increased significantly. Between 1972 and 1986, this rise in inharmonicity was accompanied by an increase in noise, but since 1986, both inharmonicity and noise have moderately decreased. In recent years (up to 2020), popular music has remained much more inharmonic than popular music from the 1960s or orchestral music involving acoustic resonance instruments. However, it has become less noisy, with noise levels comparable to those of orchestral music. We relate these trends to the evolution of music production techniques. In particular, the use of multi-tracking may explain the higher inharmonicity in popular music compared to orchestral music. We illustrate these trends with analyses of key artists and tracks.

The ultimate purpose of generative music AI is music production. The studio-lab, a social form within the art-science branch of cross-disciplinarity, is a way to advance music production with AI music models. During a studio-lab experiment involving researchers, music producers, and an AI model for music generating bass-like audio, it was observed that the producers used the model's output to convey two or more pitches with a single harmonic complex tone, which in turn revealed that the model had learned to generate structured and coherent simultaneous melodic lines using monophonic sequences of harmonic complex tones. These findings prompt a reconsideration of the long-standing debate on whether humans can perceive harmonics as distinct pitches and highlight how generative AI can not only enhance musical creativity but also contribute to a deeper understanding of music.

Music information retrieval distinguishes between low- and high-level descriptions of music. Current generative AI models rely on text descriptions that are higher level than the controls familiar to studio musicians. Pitch strength, a low-level perceptual parameter of contemporary popular music, may be one feature that could make such AI models more suited to music production. Signal and perceptual analyses suggest that pitch strength (1) varies significantly across and inside songs; (2) contributes to both small- and large-scale structure; (3) contributes to the handling of polyphonic dissonance; and (4) may be a feature of upper harmonics made audible in a perspective of perceptual richness.

Sleep is essential for health, yet studying its dynamics requires manual sleep staging, a labor-intensive step in research and clinical care. Across centers, polysomnography (PSG) recordings are traditionally scored in 30-s epochs for pragmatic, not physiological, reasons and vary in electrode count, montage, and subject characteristics. These constraints challenge harmonized multi-center studies and the discovery of robust biomarkers on shorter timescales. We present AnySleep, a deep neural network that scores sleep from any electroencephalography (EEG) or electrooculography (EOG) data at adjustable temporal resolutions. We trained and validated the model on over 20,000 overnight recordings (> 200,000 hours of EEG and EOG) from 28 datasets across multiple clinics to promote robust generalization across sites. The model attains state-of-the-art performance and surpasses or equals established baselines at 30-s epochs. Performance improves with more channels, yet remains strong when EOG is absent or only EOG or single EEG derivations (frontal, central, or occipital) are available. On sub-30-s timescales, the model captures short wake intrusions consistent with arousals and improves prediction of pathophysiological conditions (obstructive sleep apnea, narcolepsy type 1, insomnia) over 30-s scoring. We make the model publicly available to facilitate large-scale studies with heterogeneous electrode setups and accelerate biomarker discovery in sleep.

Omnidirectional images are increasingly used in robotics and vision due to their wide field of view. However, extending 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to panoramic camera models remains challenging, as existing formulations are designed for perspective projections and naive adaptations often introduce distortion and geometric inconsistencies. We present Spherical-GOF, an omnidirectional Gaussian rendering framework built upon Gaussian Opacity Fields (GOF). Unlike projection-based rasterization, Spherical-GOF performs GOF ray sampling directly on the unit sphere in spherical ray space, enabling consistent ray-Gaussian interactions for panoramic rendering. To make the spherical ray casting efficient and robust, we derive a conservative spherical bounding rule for fast ray-Gaussian culling and introduce a spherical filtering scheme that adapts Gaussian footprints to distortion-varying panoramic pixel sampling. Extensive experiments on standard panoramic benchmarks (OmniBlender and OmniPhotos) demonstrate competitive photometric quality and substantially improved geometric consistency. Compared with the strongest baseline, Spherical-GOF reduces depth reprojection error by 57% and improves cycle inlier ratio by 21%. Qualitative results show cleaner depth and more coherent normal maps, with strong robustness to global panorama rotations. We further validate generalization on OmniRob, a real-world robotic omnidirectional dataset introduced in this work, featuring UAV and quadruped platforms. The source code and the OmniRob dataset will be released at this https URL.

Maintaining situational awareness in high-stakes multi-robot applications requires balancing exploration of unobserved regions with sustained monitoring of changing Regions of Interest (ROIs), often under unknown and time-varying distributions, partial observability, and limited communication. We propose a decentralized multi-agent coverage framework that serves as a high-level planning strategy, in which each agent computes an adaptive ergodic policy, implemented via a Markov-chain, that tracks an updated belief over the underlying importance map. Beliefs are maintained online via Gaussian Process (GP) regression from local noisy observations exchanged with neighbors. The resulting policy drives agents to spend time in ROIs in proportion to their estimated importance, while preserving sufficient exploration to detect and adapt to time-varying environmental changes. Unlike existing approaches that assume known importance maps, centralized coordination, or a static environment, our framework addresses the combined challenges of unknown, time-varying distributions under a decentralized, partially observable setting. We further show that our framework is robust to communication and memory degradation, robot loss, and can scale up to hundreds of robots.

Rydberg atomic quantum receivers (RAQRs) have recently emerged as a promising technology for radio-frequency (RF) reception by directly transducing incident RF fields into optical signals. Existing receiver architectures, however, exploit only subsets of the dipole-allowed transitions within a given atomic manifold, limiting the number of simultaneously accessible RF channels. In this paper, a hybrid six-level Rydberg atomic quantum receiver (H-RAQR) is proposed by integrating parallel and cascaded RF coupling pathways within a single vapor-cell receiver. A communication-oriented analytical framework is developed by deriving a closed-form steady-state atom--field interaction model and establishing an equivalent baseband signal representation. The achievable ergodic sum rate is analyzed, and a resource-efficiency metric is introduced to quantify throughput per unit optical receiver resource. The analytical model is validated against full Lindblad master-equation simulations over its identified operating region. Numerical results show that the proposed H-RAQR supports four simultaneous RF channels within a single atomic system, achieves higher ergodic sum rate than conventional parallel Rydberg state (PRS) and cascade Rydberg state (CRS) receivers, and provides about 29% higher resource efficiency than a combined PRS-CRS deployment with equivalent four-band coverage. The proposed framework provides a scalable foundation for multi-band atomic wireless receivers.

We derive distance relay characteristics in terms of incremental phasors. We use a circuit model of the network to estimate the incremental remote current. If we assume that all sources are stationary, i.e., remain periodic shortly after a fault, then the incremental remote current, and thus the characteristics, do not depend on the real-time voltages or current injections of the sources.