Continuous cardiac monitoring in wearable devices demands classifiers that are simultaneously accurate, energy-efficient, and deployable on resource-constrained hardware. While deep neural network approaches have demonstrated high classification accuracy for electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmia detection, their substantial parameter counts and reliance on multiply-accumulate-intensive operations make them impractical for low-cost edge platforms. In this work, we propose ECG-LDC, a hardware-software co-design framework that adapts Low-Dimensional Computing (LDC) for real-time ECG arrhythmia classification. ECG-LDC employs a dual-encoder architecture with dedicated value and feature codebooks to independently encode morphological waveform features and RR-interval temporal features, enabling effective capture of both intra-beat and inter-beat cardiac dynamics. The framework encompasses data preprocessing, model training, and a hardware accelerator architecture prototyped on the Pynq-Z2 platform. Implemented using binary representations and XOR/XNOR-based operations, ECG-LDC achieves $97.18\%$ accuracy with a memory footprint of only $3.86\ \text{kB}$. ECG-LDC sacrifices approximately $1.8\%$ accuracy versus SOTA TinyML classifiers but achieves $11$~$ 570\times$ reduction in memory usage; among FPGA-based five-class arrhythmia classifiers, it delivers the highest accuracy with up to $2.4\times$ fewer LUTs and zero DSP block utilization, affirming its suitability for real-time arrhythmia detection on resource-constrained wearable platforms.

Sparse monitoring of reservoir pressure and saturation requires numerical methods that retain gridded structure while reconstructing full fields from few observations. We present a four-dimensional tensor-based modal decomposition (TBMD) and sparse reconstruction framework for coupled pressure-saturation fields. The approach uses an explicit property mode, mode-4 pivoted orthogonal-triangular (QR) ranking of grid-wide spatial-property fibers, and tensor-based compressive sensing for both grid-wide and existing-well measurement operators. The Brugge benchmark is evaluated using 10 well-control realizations with fixed geology. Each realization is processed independently as a tensor of size 139 x 48 x 2 x 134 under an 80/20 temporal split with training-fitted property-wise min-max normalization. In the joint pressure-saturation well-only study, increasing the number of instrumented wells from 1 to 10 reduces the relative Frobenius error from about 0.57 to 0.20, increases the Structural Similarity Index Measure from about 0.47 to 0.88, and raises the peak signal-to-noise ratio from about 33.8 to 37 dB. By 20 wells, the relative error drops to about 0.11. The results support the feasibility of tensor-structured sparse reconstruction for coupled reservoir fields and provide a basis for controlled comparisons with alternative reduced-order and sparse-sensing methods.

Sleep spindle is a physiologically significant biomedical signal in electroencephalographic (EEG) waveforms, which is typically a low-amplitude event in sleep. Due to the small signal ratio in the overall EEG, previous detection methods have limited capability to capture its start and end points and lack flexibility in handling multi-spindle scenarios. To address the gap, we address the problem from a new perspective and introduce SpindleFlexNet, the first framework in this field to apply deep learning-based one-dimensional object detection, leveraging an adapted one-dimensional RetinaNet architecture. The framework employs one-dimensional anchor generation, matching, and regression, along with a customized one-dimensional loss function. Analyses were conducted on two public datasets: the Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies and DREAMS, from which a total of 11,061 and 335 segments were obtained, respectively. When trained on these datasets, SpindleFlexNet achieved an average recall, precision, and F1-score of 0.61, 0.76, 0.67, and 0.58, 0.80, 0.67 in five-fold cross-validation. The model demonstrates stable detection performance and good generalization, making it a practical tool for sleep research. Potential applications include automated spindle labeling in clinical settings and as a reference for studies combining EEG with simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Growing reports of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) radio-frequency interference (RFI) highlight the need for scalable wide-area sensing for situational awareness. Crowdsourced Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) receiver networks form a large-scale opportunistic sensor network for GNSS RFI monitoring, but ADS-B quality indicators may remain high during abnormal reported-position behavior, and heterogeneous receiver timestamping can produce apparent speed spikes. This letter proposes a three-stage framework that screens position-jump candidates, verifies local track consistency to suppress timing artifacts, and groups confirmed anomalies into traffic-adaptive multi-aircraft events. Using 605 million 1090-MHz ADS-B reports over Northeast Asia from December 2025 to February 2026, the framework identified 166 event clusters within the validity window of Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) RKRR Z1401/25 and none in the pre-NOTAM period. More than 99% of confirmed anomalies remained in high quality-indicator regimes, suggesting that track-consistency verification provides a complementary sensing criterion for GNSS RFI monitoring.

WiFi sensing based on Channel State Information (CSI) promises ubiquitous, device-free perception, yet current research remains trapped in a Tower of Babel - fragmented into isolated silos where models are tailored to specific hardware dialects, fixed environments, and narrow tasks. The primary bottleneck is the Heterogeneity Gap: the disparity in signal dimensions, sampling rates, and semantic labels that prevents cross-system understanding. To bridge this gap, we propose a foundation-model framework that treats CSI not merely as raw signals but as a structured language with a learnable universal grammar. We first curate and standardize a large collection of heterogeneous real-world CSI datasets, establishing a unified infrastructure that allows incompatible signal formats to be treated as a single corpus. Second, we introduce a modular architecture that acts as a universal translator where lightweight dataset-specific adapters tokenize diverse signal inputs into a shared latent vocabulary, while a shared self-supervised Transformer backbone learns the temporal syntax of human motion and environmental dynamics. This design decouples sensing semantics from hardware syntax. Extensive evaluations show that by mastering this universal language, our approach consistently outperforms task-specific baselines and exhibits strong generalization capability in new environments, achieving superior efficiency in few-shot scenarios. By effectively absorbing heterogeneity, the framework offers a path toward robust, general-purpose wireless sensing, mirroring the linguistic generalization observed in Large Language Models. The code implementation is available at: this https URL.

Movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease require comprehensive motor assessment, but reliable digital assessment pipelines integrating multiple sensing modalities across diverse motor tasks remain insufficiently characterized. We present a proof-of-concept study evaluating task-specific modality performance and multimodal fusion across ten motor activities. Synchronized EEG-IMU data were recorded from six participants (52 recording pairs). We evaluated an EEGNet + Transformer model for 16-channel EEG (125 Hz) and XGBoost on hand-crafted accelerometer and gyroscope features (25 Hz). Under 5-fold cross-validation in a subject-dependent setting, IMU achieved 94.41+/-0.58% accuracy and outperformed EEG on 7 of 10 activities, while EEG achieved 92.82+/-1.45% and showed lower error for rhythmic cycling (4.03% vs. 12.10%). Late fusion via logistic regression reached 98.68+/-0.32%, giving an 81.5% error reduction versus EEG alone and improving worst-task accuracy from approximately 87% for a single modality to 96.76%. Fusion also reduced cross-task performance variance from approximately 3% to 1.06% (paired t-test, p < 0.001, df = 4; p-values approximate given fold dependence), showing more uniform reliability across the assessment battery. Although the small sample limits generalizability, these results suggest that EEG and IMU provide asymmetric, task-dependent strengths and that late fusion can leverage this complementarity to improve assessment reliability. This study provides methodological and empirical motivation for larger-scale clinical validation in movement disorder populations.

Foundation models have recently emerged as a powerful paradigm for learning transferable representations from large scale biomedical data, yet existing approaches for physiological waveforms primarily optimize reconstruction or forecasting objectives that do not explicitly preserve clinically meaningful waveform morphology. Electrocardiograms (ECGs) and pulse oximetry (SpO2) waveforms encode rich cardiovascular and hemodynamic information through their morphological structure. In this work, we introduce MorphologyFM, a multimodal foundation model pretrained on paired ECG and SpO2 waveforms from the MIMIC critical care database using a morphology aware self supervised learning objective. MorphologyFM combines morphology guided masking, cross modal representation learning, and contrastive latent alignment to learn representations that capture clinically relevant physiological structure without requiring manual annotations. We evaluate MorphologyFM across multiple downstream prediction tasks, including arrhythmia classification, hypoxemia prediction, mortality prediction, and length of stay estimation, demonstrating consistent improvements over representative self supervised learning methods, including Masked Autoencoders (MAE), contrastive learning, Barlow Twins, and Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). Furthermore, we show that jointly modeling ECG and SpO2 waveforms produces more transferable representations than single modality pretraining. Our results establish waveform morphology as a powerful inductive bias for self supervised physiological representation learning and introduce MorphologyFM as a general purpose foundation model for continuous physiological monitoring.

This paper presents a machine learning framework for data-driven inverse design of V-beam thermal sensors. The goal is to determine the optimal sensor geometry: beam inclination angle, beam length and beam width that achieves a target displacement under a given temperature. The design should also provide the geometry with minimum structure volume and minimum mechanical stress the sensor must support. This problem is ill-posed as for a given displacement there are multiple possible geometric configurations, causing direct regression methods to fail. We document a series of five exploratory trials that progressively revealed the nature of the problem culminating in a two-phase solution: a neural network forward model trained to map geometry and material constants to sensor responses, a gradient-descent inverse optimization over the frozen forward model, minimizing stress and volume simultaneously. The proposed pipeline utilizes a 3000-sample dataset and achieves a MAPE of 4.76% for predicting the displacement, more than 70% of predictions having MAPE of under 5%.

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) uses transmitter-specific hardware imperfections as a physicallayer identity cue for Internet of Things (IoT) devices, but deep RFFI models often degrade when the acquisition environment changes. In multi-antenna reception, this degradation is not merely a generic distribution shift. It is also shaped by receiver-array topology, frequency-offset dynamics, and capturedependent target structure, which can distort embeddings and move source-trained decision boundaries. This article proposes physics-informed structure anchoring with capture-aware prototype calibration (PISA-CAPC), a framework that separates source representation anchoring from fixed-backbone target calibration. The representation stage organizes antenna tokens with a topology graph and modulates the graph using CFO-derived acquisition-dynamics descriptors. Bounded contextual residual suppression is then applied around the identity representation. At deployment, unlabeled capture-aware prototype calibration (U-CAPC) calibrates target decision scores through capturelocal prototype evidence under a fixed representation, mitigating boundary shift without requiring target-domain backbone updates or target labels. On a measured ten-transmitter multiantenna WiFi benchmark, PISA-CAPC achieves 0.9257 targetdomain mean Macro-F1 under a balanced transductive setting. Ablations confirm that topology-guided structure anchoring, contextual residual suppression, and capture-aware calibration contribute complementary gains. These results establish PISACAPC as a fixed-backbone route to cross-environment RFFI, coupling physically motivated representation learning with labelfree, capture-aware decision calibration.

The paper presents a voice anonymization model focusing on preserving content rather than producing realistic speech. It relies on content embeddings extracted from a frozen pretrained wav2vec2 encoder. These embeddings are decoded into an anonymized signal using vector quantization and a HiFi-GAN vocoder, both trained on LibriTTS without any waveform reconstruction loss or speaker embedding mapping. The training objective enforces that embeddings of the anonymized signal match those of the original one. While training, an auxiliary speaker classification branch with a gradient reversal layer is used to discard speakerspecific information. Results show that this straightforward embedding-based approach achieves very low WER (2.53) with an anonymization performance (EER 13.39) ranking within first level for VPC. Notably, emotions are partially preserved (UAR 43.91), even without a supporting training objective, while the anonymized voice is audible without reconstruction loss.

Three-dimensional (3D) radio map (RM) is a key enabler for environment-aware communications in low-altitude wireless scenarios by providing site-specific channel priors indexed by spatial locations. However, existing 3D RM construction methods lack effective modeling of the height dimension, which limits their generalization to unseen height configurations and degrades construction coherence across height layers. In this paper, we propose BDFlow-3DRM, a bi-dynamical flow matching framework for 3D RM construction. Specifically, the 3D RM construction problem is formulated as a deterministic probability flow in a semantic latent space. BDFlow-3DRM learns continuous height-aware representations from flexible transceiver height inputs, enhancing geometric awareness. Meanwhile, its bi-dynamical design explicitly models bidirectional dependencies across neighboring height layers, so that RMs at different height layers can be constructed jointly. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets, covering diverse simplified and realistic urban scenarios, validate the effectiveness of BDFlow-3DRM. Compared with diffusion-based baselines, it reduces the normalized mean square error (NMSE) by 28.6% and attains a 180-fold reduction in inference complexity. More importantly, with only 20 training receiver-height layers, BDFlow-3DRM maintains accurate prediction over a wide continuous receiver-height range from 1 to 120 m under variable transmitter heights, highlighting its practical potential for large-scale 3D RM construction.

Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) is a minimally invasive procedure used to restore coronary blood flow obstructed by atherosclerotic plaque. During PCI, repeated injections of iodine-based contrast agents are required to visualize the coronary arteries and guide interventional devices. However, frequent contrast injections increase radiation exposure and the risk of contrast-induced nephropathy, with acute kidney injury reported in up to 30% of patients with renal impairment. Dynamic Coronary Roadmapping (DRM) reduces these risks by overlaying a precomputed angiographic vessel map onto live fluoroscopy and continuously updating it throughout the procedure. Accurate DRM relies on precise cardiac phase matching between angiography and fluoroscopy, together with reliable catheter tip tracking for motion compensation. These tasks remain challenging in ECG-free settings and when only limited manual annotations are available. We present a unified DRM framework that simultaneously performs cardiac phase matching and catheter tip tracking for accurate real-time guidance. Our method employs a large-scale spatio-temporal encoder pretrained on 16 million X-ray frames to learn cardiac motion dynamics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of large-scale spatio-temporal pretraining for motion compensation in DRM. We further introduce auxiliary tasks based on ECG R-peak detection and catheter tip tracking, improving optimization while eliminating the need for extensive catheter mask annotations. Finally, a majority-voting postprocessing strategy aggregates temporal predictions, improving robustness and providing a confidence score that correlates with phase-matching error. Comprehensive evaluation on clinical X-ray datasets demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, achieving low temporal misalignment and robust phase-matching accuracy suitable for real-time DRM.

Deep models for retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) classification report high accuracy but rarely report whether their confidence can be trusted -- a gap that matters when a wrong-but-confident reading delays sight-saving treatment. We pair a hybrid convolutional-Transformer encoder with a gradient-boosting (XGBoost) classification head and a three-part clinical safety layer: confidence calibration, out-of-distribution (OOD) rejection, and per-prediction uncertainty flagging. On four-class OCT (84,495 scans) the model reaches 95.4% accuracy while cutting calibration error twelve-fold (expected calibration error, ECE = 0.0024), so the confidence it reports tracks its true accuracy. To our knowledge this is the first OCT classifier to validate all three safety mechanisms jointly, with public weights and reproducible multi-seed evaluation.

Microbial density is clinically important for tumor assessment and treatment decision-making, and recent advances in deep learning suggest that it can be non-invasively inferred from multimodal MRI. In this work, MRI-based Microbial Density Stratification (MRI-MDS) is first investigated as a patient-level representation learning task, and Center Heatmap-driven Macro-micro modeling Network (CHM-Net) is introduced for this task. CHM-Net first establishes the link between imaging phenotypes and microbial states through center heatmap-guided small-lesion response localization. Building upon this, it constructs patient-level macro-micro evidence from localized heatmap responses for microbial density prediction. Experiments on the novel GBNPC 2026 dataset constructed for MRI-MDS demonstrate the effectiveness of CHM-Net, achieving superior performance over representative baselines with a 12.06% absolute ACC gain over the strongest competing result. Additionally, auxiliary validation on two 3D medical image datasets further verifies its robustness across volumetric medical image classification scenarios. The project is available at this https URL.

Medical imaging generates high-resolution images posing significant storage, transmission, and computational challenges. While low-rank matrix approximation (LoRMA) techniques offer efficient compression by exploiting structural redundancy, global approaches often fail to preserve local details critical for diagnosis. This paper focuses on clustering techniques that exploit non-local self-similarity to identify structurally similar regions in medical images. These clusters can be used for post-processing tasks such as adaptive image compression. We evaluate five clustering techniques: k-means, mini-batch k-means, agglomerative hierarchical clustering, balanced iterative reducing and clustering using hierarchies (BIRCH), and bisecting k-means across MRI, ultrasound, and chest X-ray modalities. All clustering techniques were optimised using random search, and cluster quality was assessed using the Silhouette score, the Davies-Bouldin (DB) index, and the Calinski-Harabasz (CH) index. Results demonstrate that standard k-means and bisecting k-means generally achieve strong cluster cohesion and separation across modalities. However, they tend to form a small number of clusters with high intra-cluster variability, limiting their effectiveness for post-processing tasks such as adaptive compression. Agglomerative clustering outperformed other techniques for MRI and ultrasound in terms of intra-cluster homogeneity, making it more suitable for preserving fine diagnostic details. For chest X-rays, mini-batch k-means achieved the best balance between clustering quality and intra-cluster compactness. BIRCH consistently underperformed across all modalities.

The differentiable shift-variant filtered backprojection (SV-FBP) framework enables data-driven estimation of redundancy weights for cone-beam CT reconstruction under general source trajectories, removing the need for analytically derived weighting schemes. In this work, we present a systematic study of the robustness and adaptability of differentiable SV-FBP under challenging acquisition settings. We show that the framework remains stable across highly irregular and discontinuous trajectories, indicating that reconstruction performance is largely insensitive to trajectory ordering or continuity. Instead, the spatial distribution of sampling points plays a more dominant role. Under sparse-view conditions, differentiable SV-FBP achieves competitive reconstruction quality while providing an order-of-magnitude reduction in computation time compared to iterative reconstruction methods at moderate sampling densities. However, we identify a clear transition regime under severe undersampling, where the absence of iterative data consistency leads to performance degradation. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the framework remains applicable to non-planar multi-isocenter geometries, such as Lissajous-saddle trajectories, without requiring architectural modifications. These findings provide new insights into the behavior and limitations of the differentiable SV-FBP model and highlight it as a flexible and efficient solution for non-standard and robotic CBCT acquisition scenarios.

In time-lapse fluorescence imaging, single-particle-tracking is a powerful tool to monitor the dynamics of objects of interest, and extract information about biological processes. However, tracked particles can be subject to occlusion and intermittent detectability. When these phenomena persist over a few frames, tracking algorithms tend to produce multiple tracklets for the same particle. In this work, we introduce self-supervised learning of visual features to compare tracked particles, and we exploit both visual and positional distances to robustly stitch tracklets representing the same particle. We demonstrate the performance of our stitching framework on time-lapse fluorescence sequences of Hydra vulgaris neurons. Results show high stitching precision, and reduction of errors made by previous algorithms on the same data by a factor of two.

Deep learning-based segmentation of histopathology whole-slide images (WSIs) requires large amounts of pixel-level annotations, which are costly and time-consuming to obtain. Active learning (AL) has been proposed to reduce this effort, but existing methods exhibit three key limitations. Uncertainty estimation is unreliable on partially annotated WSIs, patch-level acquisition is inconsistent with slide-level annotation workflows, and class imbalance in multi-class settings is not explicitly addressed. To address these challenges, we propose SHAL (Slide-level Hybrid Active Learning), a patient-level AL framework for annotation-efficient multi-class histopathology segmentation. SHAL integrates three complementary components: a foreground-aware strategy that suppresses bias from unlabeled background regions, a stage-adaptive mechanism that hybridizes predictive entropy and epistemic uncertainty across learning stages, and a class-aware strategy that prioritizes diagnostically relevant tissue classes. SHAL is evaluated on the TCGA colorectal cancer dataset. It achieves the highest Macro Dice at the full annotation budget (0.846) and reaches Dice greater than or equal to 0.80 using only 26 percent of the budget (50 of 190 slides), whereas competing methods reach this threshold only at 37 percent (70 slides). Across five independent external cohorts, SHAL attains the highest mean external Macro Dice (0.815) and the smallest internal-to-external generalization gap among all methods (0.025 at Round 3 and 0.026 at the full budget). The results indicate that patient-level hybrid uncertainty acquisition reduces annotation cost without sacrificing cross-domain generalization in computational pathology.

This paper proposes a distributed traffic state estimation framework that combines infrastructure sensors and connected vehicles as cooperative sensing nodes. Using Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, nearby nodes exchange local estimates and update them through a distributed Kalman filter designed for a second-order macroscopic traffic flow model. A consensus step fuses heterogeneous information across the network, while projection steps enforce physically consistent traffic states. We evaluate the method on HighD and NGSIM data, and on microscopic SUMO simulations that capture transient congestion. The results show accurate reconstruction of highway traffic states and detection of nonlinear shockwave dynamics, even with sparse infrastructure sensing and intermittent vehicular connectivity. A statistical analysis further shows how CV penetration rate, V2X communication range, and infrastructure deployment affect estimation accuracy. In particular, with 10% CV penetration, V2X ranges of 300-400 m, and sparse infrastructure deployment, the combined infrastructure-vehicle configuration consistently outperforms approaches that rely only on infrastructure or only on connected vehicles.

We introduce DenseAR, a new generative paradigm that reformulates autoregressive image generation as coarse-to-fine next-dense-stride prediction using a compact single-scale tokenizer. Our key insight is that traversing a single-scale latent grid with progressively denser strides naturally captures the transition from global structure to fine detail. This addresses two limitations of existing autoregressive models at once: the slow inference of raster-order autoregression, which DenseAR avoids by predicting multiple tokens in parallel, and the heavy cost of multi-scale approaches, which need long, multi-resolution token sequences to achieve coarse-to-fine prediction. Building on our efficient framework and the flexibility of autoregressive modeling, we further extend DenseAR to a unified model that handles multiple modalities and imaging tasks within a single backbone. We validate DenseAR on both medical and natural images. On multi-contrast brain MRI, a single DenseAR model unifies cross-modal translation, modality-conditioned generation, and tumor segmentation, while remaining competitive with task-specific methods. On ImageNet, DenseAR improves class-conditional generation quality (FID and IS) over both a single-grid baseline without stride ordering and a multi-scale tokenizer-based baseline.

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has emerged as a promising approach for traffic signal control. However, standard MARL policies typically optimize for expected returns under nominal conditions, leaving them highly vulnerable to spatial-temporal demand shifts and catastrophic congestion under adverse scenarios. To address this critical limitation, this paper proposes an algorithm-agnostic Distributionally Robust (DR) MARL framework integrating an adaptive Contextual-Bandit Worst-Case Estimator (CB-WCE). Operating on a slower timescale, the CB-WCE co-evolves with the traffic controllers by dynamically generating adversarial demand mixtures during training. This steers the learning process to fortify policies against bottleneck scenarios without requiring modifications to the underlying MARL architectures. The framework is evaluated across value-based, actor-critic, and policy-gradient methods on both a synthetic 5x5 grid and a heterogeneous Monaco City network. Empirical results demonstrate that the DR framework prevents unbounded queue growth and profoundly enhances both worst-case robustness and average-case efficiency. Notably, for the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) architecture in the Monaco environment, on average, robust retraining reduced the worst-case queue length by 74.39% and improved the average-case network-wide queue length by 75.45%. Furthermore, the retrained policies exhibit strong zero-shot generalization to unseen traffic distributions, highlighting the framework's scalability and potential for resilient real-world urban deployment.

Accurate determination of the rotation-axis position is a prerequisite for artifact-free reconstruction in parallel-beam synchrotron micro-tomography. Traditional approaches such as Vo's method rely on sinogram features that can fail for low-contrast or weakly absorbing specimens. We present a learning-based method that treats center selection as a binary classification problem, using a DINOv2-pretrained vision transformer aggregated with attention-based multiple-instance learning, fine-tuned end-to-end on tomographic images. At inference time, the proposed algorithm was applied to a stack of tomograms reconstructed at a sweep of candidate centers to select the optimal center for reconstruction. We tested the estimation accuracy of the proposed method on two independent data sources and consistently achieved a mean absolute error of below 1 pixel. We also tested the method robustness to sparse or noisy acquisitions with the same datasets and demonstrated consistent performance when the number of projections was reduced by a factor of up to 10 or the blank scan factor of the underlying Poisson's noise was increased to 10. We also illustrated the interpretability of the proposed method by mapping out the relative contributions of continuous spatial features to the overall classification task. This method, delivered as tomo-center, an open-source command-line tool, has been integrated into several tomography software packages to assist experiments during the routine beamline operations.

This paper proposes a new notion of robust invertibility for nonlinear dynamical systems, and introduces constructive parameterizations of recurrent neural network which are robustly invertible by design. We define robust invertibility as the existence of a causal inverse system such that both the forward and inverse systems are contracting and have bounded incremental input-output gains (the system is bi-Lipschitz), implying that both forward prediction and input reconstruction are robust to signal perturbations and initial-state mismatch. We construct robustly invertible recurrent models via series composition of static orthogonal layers and dynamic layers satisfying a strong input-output monotonicity property, and provide a differentiable neural network parameterizations in the form of the bi-Lipschitz recurrent equilibrium network (BiLipREN). Additionally, composition with dynamic orthogonal layers yields a nonlinear minimum-phase/all-pass (a.k.a. inner--outer) factorization. We illustrate the utility of the framework through a series of application examples in data-driven internal model control, dynamic surrogate loss learning, and signal-space normalizing flows, illustrating its utility for robust control, trajectory optimization, and generative modeling of complex trajectory distributions.

Flexible interconnection agreements are increasingly used to streamline the distributed generation interconnection process by limiting real power exports and avoiding costly grid upgrades. Agrivoltaic systems--solar photovoltaic (PV) panels installed over agricultural land--can provide added value under these agreements by adjusting the PV panels away from sun tracking while increasing the sunlight available to crops. This technical note investigates the operation of agrivoltaics under flexible interconnection limits and evaluates their impact on both PV energy production and crop outcomes. We formulate an optimization problem that determines the time-varying tilt of a single-axis tracking agrivoltaic system to maximize energy production subject to a real power export limit over an entire growing season. The resulting PV operating schedules are then used to evaluate PV energy production and crop yield. In a case study, we demonstrate that agrivoltaic systems can comply with flexible interconnection agreements through operational adjustments that improve crop yield, distinguishing them from conventional PV systems that rely solely on inverter curtailment.

Time-efficient and robust visual intelligence remains a critical challenge in unstructured open-world environments, yet current approaches often rely on computationally intensive neural architectures or task-specific sensors with limited versatility. Inspired by biological vision and information bottleneck theory, we report a neuromorphic vision system that performs task-oriented visual intelligence through an information distillation strategy (named as task traction mechanism) implemented on hardware. The system integrates a polarization-sensitive imager with a resistive random-access memory (RRAM) array to progressively distill task-relevant information via light field selection, region of interest extraction, and target anticipation. The neuromorphic vision system conducts visual tasks within an execution time of 193 {\mu}s. Evaluation across eight challenging open-world scenarios shows accuracy improvements of 25.54%, 37.73%, and 36.10% for object tracking, object segmentation, and trajectory prediction, respectively, together with an average 30.6-fold reduction in latency relative to state-of-the-art solutions.

This paper develops a geometry-consistent fully multiplicative unscented Kalman filter (FM-UKF) for joint spacecraft attitude--orbit estimation with simultaneous dual star-tracker misalignment calibration. The estimator uses a 21-dimensional local error state combining attitude, angular velocity, gyroscope bias, inertial position and velocity, and two tracker-misalignment vectors on a mixed quaternion--Euclidean manifold. Gyroscope, star-tracker, and planet line-of-sight measurements are fused, with celestial aberration retained to capture velocity-dependent optical coupling. A multiplicative extended Kalman filter (MEKF) is implemented as a first-order baseline using the same nominal state, attitude retraction, and unit-vector measurement geometry. Monte Carlo results show similar short-step performance, while at coarse propagation intervals the proposed FM-UKF remains consistent and the MEKF exhibits divergence.

WaveNet-style convolutional networks emulate tube amplifiers and distortion pedals with high fidelity, but their computational cost has confined them to desktops or dedicated DSP hardware. We present a sparse-enabled WaveNet inference engine for iOS that runs heavily pruned neural guitar amplifier models in real time on iPhones. Aggressive iterative magnitude pruning removes 90% of the network weights with no perceptible loss in quality. A custom sparse C++ engine turns this sparsity directly into compute savings, sustaining low-latency real-time operation on a CPU-only iPhone implementation where the dense model cannot. On-device output matches the trained model to within int16 quantization error. At the demonstration, visitors will play a guitar through the app on iPhone hardware and A/B the on-device pruned model against the physical pedal it emulates. Source code and audio examples are available at this https URL.

This work investigates nonlinear uncertainty propagation in perturbed astrodynamics, focusing on the rapid characterization of non-Gaussian distributions and the construction of three-dimensional "banana-shaped" confidence boundaries. To bridge the gap between computationally intensive high-fidelity methods and inaccurate linear approximations, this paper introduces a fully analytical, sample-free framework for higher-order moments extraction. Leveraging Differential Algebra to bypass repeated numerical integration, statistical moments are extracted analytically via Isserlis' theorem and a monomial-to-Hermite basis transformation. A pair-product projection strategy is exploited to overcome the severe computational bottleneck of full fourth-order tensor contractions and compute only relevant terms via efficient polynomial algebra. The extracted skewness and kurtosis components directly parameterize non-elliptical confidence geometries that capture spatial bending and out-of-plane coupling of typical non-Gaussian distributions in astrodynamics. The approach is validated in high-fidelity environments including a cislunar Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit and close-proximity trajectories around Apophis during Earth's flyby, where the analytical approach achieves geometric accuracy comparable to expensive Monte Carlo simulations while reducing computational runtime by orders of magnitude.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables future wireless networks to perform sensing and communication (S&C) over a shared waveform. In multistatic ISAC systems, however, the sensing receivers do not know the realizations of transmitted data symbols, making it challenging to exploit communication signals for sensing. In this paper, we propose a data-aided framework for target localization with two receiver strategies, namely statistical data-aided sensing and joint data-aided sensing and decoding, where the former marginalizes the random unknown data symbols and the latter reuses the reliably decoded data symbols as known virtual pilots. Under orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signaling, we derive the performance limits for target localization in both strategies and adopt the achievable ergodic data rate as the communication metric. Then, we formulate a joint time-allocation and transmit data-covariance design problem for target localization under communication constraints, which characterizes the joint S&C bound and quantifies the sensing gain provided by data symbols. In addition, we develop two target localization algorithms that implement the proposed data-aided receiver processing, and extend the framework to finite-alphabet signaling. Simulation results validate theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed data-aided schemes.

Minimal-array time-difference-of-arrival (TDoA) localization with three planar receivers reduces to a scalar quadratic whose two roots can both be feasible target positions, leaving a branch-selection ambiguity intrinsic to the minimal geometry. Because a minimal array is the cheapest, most deployable passive configuration, this ambiguity is conventionally broken only by adding a fourth receiver or an angle sensor, sacrificing the very minimality that motivates the array. This article resolves it from the measurements alone. Implicit differentiation shows that the two roots share an identical sensitivity denominator, so classical root conditioning cannot separate them and the entire asymmetry resides in the numerator. A closed-form analysis then yields an exact sign condition for the asymmetry, and over the feasible interior the more sensitive root is the outer, physical one, away from two algebraic degeneracy loci. A causal, constant-memory selector smooths a per-root variability statistic, whose expectation is shown to be proportional to the per-root sensitivity in the noise-dominated regime, and selects the larger one. Across a dimensionless receiver atlas the physical root is the more sensitive at a median of 85\% of two-feasible-root operating points (median sensitivity ratio 16), and, because the more sensitive root is the outer one, a simple outer-root rule attains near-0.99 branch-selection accuracy on this interior, matched online by a causal, constant-memory realization. The decisive empirical finding is that smoothness- and continuity-based disambiguation, the natural alternatives, invert under timing noise and fall below chance.

Ultra-lightweight models are essential for the deployment of deep learning-based speech enhancement algorithms on edge devices. Although recent approaches have achieved a certain balance between computational complexity and performance, pushing the complexity limits further demands more sophisticated designs. In this letter, we propose CoFi-Lite, a highly efficient model that decouples spectral modeling into coarse- and fine-grained streams. By leveraging two parallel and symmetric encoder-decoder paths, it simultaneously extracts full-band envelopes and low-frequency details for complementary enhancement. In addition, a novel Cross-Path Fusion (CPF) module is introduced to bridge the distinct paths, facilitating efficient feature interaction. Remarkably, CoFi-Lite requires extremely low computational resources, featuring only 12.87M MACs/s and 83.12k parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the ultra-lightweight baseline GTCRN while requiring only 40.26% of its computational complexity. Its scaled-up variant also delivers performance on par with that of the SOTA ultra-lightweight model AdaptCRN alongside a 19.34% reduction in computational cost. Audio examples are available at this https URL.

Automatic Mean Opinion Score (MOS) prediction is essential for evaluating large-scale synthetic speech and audio enhancement systems, yet models frequently struggle with domain shift. This study presents a comprehensive benchmarking of three architectural frameworks: Frozen Self-Supervised Learning (SSL-FRZ), Fine-Tuned SSL (SSL-FT), and a Video Vision Transformer (ViViT). Evaluation is conducted in two phases: Part I utilizes a consolidated corpus of 130,000 samples across 19 diverse datasets, while Part II focuses on a purified 17-dataset English-only corpus. To assess robustness, a systematic Leave-One-Dataset-Out (LODO) protocol is employed to quantify the generalization gap between seen and unseen distributions. Finally, the top-performing model is benchmarked against 18 state-of-the-art (SOTA) metrics using the ARECHO framework. Results demonstrate that an English-only purified corpus consistently yields higher predictive precision across all architectures. While SSL-FT achieves the highest performance on seen validation data, the SSL-FRZ model provides superior robustness on unseen distributions, achieving a competitive Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.36 on the URGENT 2024 benchmark-closely matching domain-optimized SOTA metrics (MSE 0.30). Although the ViViT architecture remains below SSL-based models in total capacity, it delivers stable results in English-only trials. LODO results confirm that while models perform significantly better on seen samples, frozen SSL embeddings combined with deep Transformer encoders offer the most stable and scalable solution for universal speech quality assessment. To support further research, the top-performing English-only SSL-Transformer model and weights are made publicly available via Hugging Face.

Sound symbolism, the human tendency to map speech sounds to perceptual qualities such as roundness or sharpness, arises primarily from the acoustics of speech rather than spelling. Whether Speech Language Models (SLMs) share this tendency remains open, as prior evaluations rely on text or images rather than real speech. We study it using genuine human speech recordings, comparing model judgments against human data across the auditory, crossmodal, and visual components of the effect. We find that SLMs' auditory judgments align poorly with human perception and miss the acoustic cues, such as spectral tilt, that drive human intuitions, and open-weight models cannot reliably link a heard sound to its corresponding shape. With a visual-only control ruling out shape perception, the weakness localizes to how speech is represented, suggesting that perceptual alignment depends not on stronger vision but on speech representations that capture the cues humans hear.

Equitable renewable-energy planning is a sequential decision problem, but the decision variables available to a public planner differ sharply between mature and emerging economies. In the former the government largely builds generation, while in the latter it steers private investment through incentives and quotas. We formulate socially-equitable renewable-energy budget allocation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and, using a single problem-agnostic solver interface, compare the same policies across the two settings: eight U.S. cities (a mature economy) and West Java, Indonesia (an emerging economy). The results show that across both settings, a receding-horizon value-iteration policy dominates. In the U.S., it reaches 66% renewable penetration while cutting the underserved low-income population by 96% versus a random baseline. In West Java it closes the low-access gap while crowding in the most private capital. More interestingly, a naive market-chasing heuristic, which is mildly sub-optimal in the U.S., could yield catastrophic outcomes in Indonesia, by underserving every low-access region, because chasing attractive markets and serving the underserved goals diverge once the planner acts through private developers.

The safety development requirements of low-altitude economy (LAE) renders the robust low-altitude airspace monitoring critical important than ever before. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) as one of the key development trends of 6G provides potential solutions for the LAE. However, conventional antenna arrays suffer from limited three-dimensional (3D) sensing coverage and degraded angular resolution at high elevation angles. To address these challenges, this paper investigates low-altitude ISAC systems enabled by the recently proposed spherical directly-connected antenna array (DCAA). By carefully deploying multiple simple uniform planar arrays (sUPAs) over a spherical surface, without relying on any phase shifter, spherical DCAA enjoys advantages of full 3D coverage, superior and uniform angular resolution, enhanced energy-focusing and low hardware cost. In this paper, we first characterizes the sensing performance of the spherical DCAA, in terms of the sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), area average probability of detection, and Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) for both elevation and azimuth angle estimation. Then, a low-altitude ISAC optimization problem is formulated to maximize the worst-case sensing SNR over a prescribed aerial region while satisfying the communication quality-of-service requirements of ground users. To effective solve this mixed-integer non-convex problem, we develop a novel greed-based joint array selection and beamforming optimization framework. Simulation results demonstrate that spherical DCAA significantly outperforms conventional UPA in terms of sensing coverage, angle estimation accuracy, and communication-sensing SNR tradeoff, highlighting its potential for future low-altitude ISAC systems.

Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites have emerged as a promising complement to GNSS for positioning in signal challenged environments. In sparse LEO signals of opportunity scenarios, Doppler positioning often relies on only one or two satellite passes, making positioning accuracy highly dependent on pass geometry. This paper investigates dual satellite LEO Doppler accuracy prediction and geometry selection. A single pass Doppler accuracy model based on the Doppler Dilution of Precision (DDOP) framework is first validated using real Iridium measurements. An information domain fusion model is then developed to combine the effective position information from two satellite passes while accounting for pass specific clock parameters. Based on this model, an analytical relationship between the intersection angle of the two predicted error ellipses and the fused positioning accuracy is derived and verified through simulations. Long term ORBCOMM observations are further used to evaluate the practical availability of favorable satellite pairs. Results show that an intersection angle of about 20° is sufficient to achieve approximately 50 m theoretical positioning accuracy, and that such complementary satellite pairs are typically available within about 30 min. These results provide practical guidance for geometry aware satellite selection and observation scheduling in sparse LEO Doppler positioning.

Tremor is a common symptom of neurological diseases. The regular assessment of daily tremors facilitates the evaluation of disease progression and assists clinicians in optimizing treatment strategies. However, current home monitoring solutions have difficulty in dealing with user cooperation, privacy concerns, environmental interference, and system generalization, leading to feasibility concerns in activities of daily living (ADL). To this end, we propose Tremerity-Fi, a non-contact and privacy-friendly tremor severity assessment system based on mmWave radar. To realize Tremerity-Fi, we first design an adaptive beamforming algorithm to accurately identify useful but weak signals from numerous reflections captured in the environment. Second, unlike primary reflections commonly used in mmWave sensing, we leverage multipath reflections that carry useful information about the target's motion, even though they are generally considered harmful, to help reconstruct hand signals and improve sensing performance. Furthermore, we propose an unsupervised domain adaptation algorithm to improve the ability to adapt to unseen environments and users. We collect a diverse dataset of 5 patients and 25 healthy subjects in 3 scenarios, such as offices, homes, and hospitals. Extensive experiments show that our system achieves 94.51% accuracy in tremor detection, about 5 higher than the SOTA mmWave radar method, and 89.13% in tremor severity assessment, demonstrating its sufficient potential as a tremor monitoring assistant for patients with neurological diseases.

This paper proposes an efficient three-dimensional (3D) spatial power spectrum synthesis method by rotating a uniform linear array (ULA) about its center in 3D space. Inspired by classical computed tomography (CT), the ULA performs analog receive combining at each rotation angle to produce a partial coherent sum. By collecting such sums over multiple rotations, the full 3D spectrum can be synthesized online via a single radio-frequency (RF) chain, without explicitly acquiring per-antenna signals. Depending on whether the overall coherent sum is accessible, the synthesis is obtained through either a minimum operation over partial spectrum images or joint synthesis after accumulating all coherent sums. Compared with fixed uniform planar array (UPA)-based combining and dense single movable-antenna (MA) sampling for 3D cubic virtual arrays, the proposed scheme achieves full-space 3D coverage with substantially reduced sampling and movement overhead while maintaining uniformly high angular resolution. Its sampling geometry and sequential orientation design also support pipelined analog beamforming, reducing practical hardware cost. To design rotation orientations in a principled manner without prior environmental information, we aim to maximize the expected worst-case projected separation between multi-path component (MPC) pairs. A secondary criterion then minimizes the worst-case projective correlation among orientation axes to reduce orientation redundancy. Accordingly, we optimize orientation sets for different numbers of orientations under isotropic-matrix and unit-norm constraints, using a multistart smooth minimax algorithm. Numerical results show that the optimized orientations uniformly span 3D space and reconstruct full-space 3D spectra close to the dense 3D cubic reference using only a fraction of spatial samples.

In this paper, we propose a low-altitude target (LAT) recognition scheme based on multi-base station (BS) collaboration and multi-scale feature fusion for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) network. Firstly, we formulate the motion equations, echo channels, and echo signals for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), bird, vehicle, and pedestrian under multi-BS collaborative monitoring scenario. Then we extract the velocityresolution-preferred time-frequency spectrum, time-resolutionpreferred time-frequency spectrum, and the velocity-transfer time-frequency spectrum observed by each BS from echo signals. We collectively refer to these three types of time-frequency spectrum as the multi-scale feature of the LAT. Next, we design a multi-BS and multi-scale feature fusion enabled LAT recognition network with Swin Transformer, which employs the visualized images of multi-scale feature to jointly recognize the target through deep feature extraction, intra-BS feature interaction, inter-BS feature interaction, and target recognition output. We generate a massive echo signal dataset comprising 1,440,000 samples for LAT recognition within ISAC network. This dataset can serve as a public benchmark to evaluate our proposed scheme and facilitate future research. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme realizes high recognition accuracy and robust unseen-subtype generalization, confirming the effectiveness of multi-scale feature fusion and the additional gains brought by multi-BS collaboration. The project page is available at: this https URL ed-Target-Recognition-Towards-Low-Altitude-Economy/.

The integration of power converters is profoundly changing the power system dynamics and poses significant challenges for stability analysis. The dynamic interactions between the power grid and the heterogeneous converters are highly complex and difficult to analyze due to the curse of dimensionality. Moreover, system stability varies with the operating points, which are determined by the voltage magnitude, active power, and reactive power of each converter. This further complicates the analysis as it is difficult to enumerate and examine all the possible operating points. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a geometric decentralized stability certificate for power electronics (PE)-dominated power systems, which can simultaneously handle heterogeneous power converters and their variable operating points. The certificate can be checked in a decentralized and modular manner, and it is scalable for large-scale power systems. Our approach is developed based on the concept of Davis-Wielandt (DW) shell and its projections, which can effectively visualize the characteristics of high-dimensional complex matrices. We investigate how the projections of the DW shell vary with operating points and how this variation can guide the search for worst-case operating conditions. We further propose an efficient algorithm to compute the stability margin and construct the certified operating regions. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through case studies on single-converter and 54-converter wind power systems.

Channel reciprocity fundamentally limits full-duplex (FD) base stations due to multi-user co-channel interference. We examine the potential of deploying a non-reciprocal dynamic metasurface antenna (NR-DMA) at the base station to overcome this limitation. Our NR-DMA architecture connects a single circulator to three feed ports of a multi-feed DMA with strong mutual coupling (MC) between its seven feeds and 96 1-bit-programmable meta-elements. We model our system with multiport network theory, using experimentally estimated proxy parameters of a fabricated 19-GHz DMA and the measured circulator response. Our NR-DMA's reconfigurability is captured by a diagonal tunable scattering matrix, showing that non-reciprocal DMAs and RISs need not require a "beyond-diagonal" tunable scattering matrix. We jointly optimize the DMA state, analog feed weights, circulator-port assignment, and circulation direction. Our optimized NR-DMA realizes distinct forward and reverse channel responses. In our interference-limited high-SNR case study, the NR-DMA improves the FD sum rate by about 60% over a reciprocal DMA benchmark. Comparisons with proxy objectives and MC-unaware optimization show that end-to-end FD optimization and MC-aware modeling are both essential.

The increasing usage of electric vehicles in urban environments has resulted in a widespread presence of AVAS sounds. While individual vehicle sound design and testing is a common approach, real-world traffic scenarios often involve the simultaneous presence of multiple vehicles. Their combined presence may lead to changes in perception, compared to when they are presented individually, specifically regarding annoyance. The work addresses annoyance perception in scenarios involving multiple electric vehicle AVAS sounds. It changes the traditional isolated source-based view into a scene-based one by investigating the combined presence of multiple vehicle sounds as they are experienced in realistic traffic environments. Binaural listening tests were conducted using recorded electric vehicle pass-by sounds. The stimuli presented different traffic scenarios, including single and multiple-vehicles. Selected stimuli were spatially arranged to simulate vehicles approaching from opposite directions. After each stimulus, participants rated their perceived annoyance, enabling a comparison of annoyance responses between isolated and multiple AVAS sound scenarios. The test investigated how different levels of overlapping AVAS sounds affect perceived annoyance when multiple electric vehicles are passing by.

Despite recent scaling successes, multilingual ASR performance remains highly uneven, with long-tail languages suffering from severe data scarcity. This work addresses the challenge of building robust foundation models for underrepresented Central Asian languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek). We present GigaAM Multilingual, a Conformer encoder pre-trained on 2M hours of audio using a HuBERT-style objective. Crucially, we introduce a cluster-level data balancing strategy during pre-training and a domain-aware sampling method during fine-tuning to mitigate head-language dominance. In controlled comparisons, our approach outperforms strong open pretrained encoders (Whisper Large v3, Omnilingual-1B) on target languages, achieving significant gains on spontaneous speech while maintaining efficiency. We release the foundation encoder and ASR model, offering a proven recipe for effective multilingual adaptation under realistic data imbalance.

Temporal grounding in long recordings remains challenging for audio-conditioned LLMs. We present a time-aware audio LLM that answers questions with explicit timestamps over up to 120 minutes of input. Our approach interleaves periodic time markers with continuous audio tokens using large-scale synthetic supervision from a cascaded pipeline. Our model achieves strong temporal-grounding accuracy on short and long benchmarks and supports time-anchored fragment descriptions and summaries. Extensive ablations examine how time representation, marker frequency, tokenization, and duration-mixture design affect accuracy and computational cost. We release model weights and datasets to support further research on time-aware audio understanding, available at this https URL.

While recent few-step sampling text-to-audio generation models like MeanAudio substantially accelerate generation by modeling average velocities, their strict one-step generation quality still lags significantly behind multi-step counterparts. We propose FdAudio to bridge this gap. Unlike MeanAudio, which relies solely on regression against target velocity fields, our post-training approach optimizes the final one-step distribution directly across pre-trained embedding spaces via a multi-representation Fréchet-distance (FD) loss. Crucially, to prevent the multi-step degradation that naive post-training with FD-loss causes, we introduce a MeanFlow consistency objective as a structural anchor. Results demonstrate that FdAudio establishes state-of-the-art one-step T2A generation quality among few-step systems, yielding an 11.4% reduction in FD score and a 28.8% improvement in FAD score relative to the baseline MeanAudio framework. Notably, we solve FD post-training's naive multi-step degradation issue by proposing the MeanFlow anchor, enabling a 25-step sampling path to maintain high-fidelity audio synthesis that matches or surpasses strong multi-step models at a fraction of their computational latency.

Input--output feedback linearization fails at decoupling singularities, where the decoupling matrix loses rank, the relative degree is lost, and the linearizing control becomes unbounded. This paper develops a singularity-robust trajectory-tracking controller for square nonlinear control-affine systems that tracks through isolated decoupling singularities with bounded control. The method recasts tracking as real-time arc-length homotopy continuation, equivalently a continuous-time Newton/Davidenko flow, and replaces the inverse decoupling matrix by the least-norm Moore--Penrose solution of an augmented matrix $A=[\Lambda\mid b]$, where $b$ is the homotopy direction. A transversality condition $w^T b \ne 0$, with $w$ in the left null space of the decoupling matrix, keeps the augmented matrix full row rank through a generic rank-one loss. The resulting flow agrees with feedback linearization away from the singular set, tracks with $O(1/k)$ error, and re-locks after each crossing. The theory also characterizes the reflection-versus-branch-crossing dichotomy at Whitney folds and relates the reflection case to a Filippov sliding mode. Extensions cover dynamic relative-degree-one minimum-phase systems and arbitrary relative degree via filtered-error reduction. Simulations include a redundant 2-DOF manipulator, relative-degree-one and relative-degree-two plants, and a dual-active-bridge series-resonant DC/DC converter, where the method performs bounded inversion across buck/boost and resonance singularities while preserving zero-voltage soft switching.

This paper presents a data-driven method for modeling the pressure response of a hydraulic clutch control circuit. The system consists of a variable-force solenoid, accumulator, pressure regulator valve, and latch valve, and exhibits nonlinear behavior caused by hysteresis, latch transitions, and actuator dynamics. A baseline model using commanded current variables captured the general pressure response but failed to represent hysteresis and latch behavior accurately. The input vector was therefore extended with current derivative information, and several classifiers were tested to separate latch-related operating regimes before fitting Gaussian Process regression models to the resulting partitions. Nonlinear SVC and gradient boosting produced the highest latch-classification accuracy, and nonlinear SVC was selected for the final local-regression pipeline. The proposed approach was evaluated on unseen ramp-rate data and compared against a physics-based Amesim model. The machine-learning model reproduced the measured pressure response and hysteresis behavior more accurately than the physics-based simulation for the tested operating conditions. These results suggest that machine-learning plant models can complement physics-based hydraulic models during hardware development and controller calibration when representative test-stand data are available.

H.264 has been the most widely used video coding format for the past two decades due to its relative simplicity, efficiency, and wide availability of software and hardware implementations. However, optimizing codec parameters such as the quantization parameter (QP) for specific objectives (e.g., perceptual quality or machine vision tasks) is challenging due to the non-differentiable nature of standard video codecs. While differentiable proxies have recently been used to enable gradient-based optimization around standard codecs, their fidelity to the target codec is rarely explicitly characterized. In this paper, we propose a differentiable proxy learning method for H.264 intra codec to enable adaptive quantization control. Built upon a variable-rate learned compression model, the proposed proxy is made differentiable with respect to codec QP through a soft-indexing mechanism. It is then trained to approximate the rate-distortion behavior of H.264 under two quantization settings: global-QP, which uses one QP per image, and spatial-QP, which assigns QPs at the macroblock level. Using the frozen trained proxy, we develop a proxy-based adaptive quantization (AQ) framework for both perceptual optimization and machine vision tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed proxies closely approximate the rate-distortion behavior of H.264 intra codec. The resulting proxy-based AQ framework consistently improves rate-task trade-offs over fixed-QP H.264 baselines, achieving BD-rate reduction of up to 17.12% for semantic segmentation and 15.30% for MS-SSIM.

This geometric study evaluates a compact seven-petal, 6:5-resonant tulip-shaped orbit constellation for lunar south-pole positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) and direct-to-Earth relay services. The tulip-shaped orbits are compared against elliptical lunar frozen orbit (ELFO) constellations over the NASA LunaNet Service Volume 2 (SV2), covering lunar latitudes south of -75 degrees. We compare a six-satellite tulip baseline with a minimum-cost five-satellite variant; both use the same shared three-body orbit and differ only in satellite count and along-track phasing. Performance is scored against three Initial Operating Capability C (IOC-C) metrics: line-of-sight (LOS) link availability, Lunar Augmented Navigation System (LANS) geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) below 6, and daily extravehicular activity (EVA) usable-PNT windows. Both tulip constellations satisfy all three IOC-C metrics across SV2. The six-satellite configuration meets requirements with wide margin: 75% worst-point daily GDOP availability and 18 hours of daily EVA support. The five-satellite variant also passes, but with thinner margin: 44% availability and 10 hours of EVA support. Unlike the ELFO configurations, each spacecraft in the tulip-shaped constellation maintains continuous Earth line of sight, providing persistent geometric opportunity for direct single-hop Earth relay. Because all spacecraft share a single three-body orbit, initial phasing and post-failure reconstitution reduce to along-track drift maneuvers between neighboring orbits, with screening-level estimates indicating low maneuver cost.

Multiband multistatic integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in fragmented FR3 bands (7-24 GHz) enables high resolution localization via virtual wideband and spatial diversity. However, frequency anisotropy decorrelates target scattering across non-contiguous bands, while large inter-band frequency gaps generate severe grating lobes that create persistent ghost peaks. We propose sidelobe-controlled off-grid profile estimation (SCOPE), a robust localization algorithm that exploits multi-view consistency across distributed receivers and frequency bands to suppress grating-lobe ambiguities. At the transmitter, an iterative minimax precoder suppresses out-of-region sidelobes to reduce false peaks in the coarse likelihood map. At the receiver, SCOPE employs profile likelihood with Top-K inhibition-based peak selection to avoid trapping in ghost basins, followed by derivative-free off-grid refinement. Simulations demonstrate that SCOPE achieves sub-meter localization with 90% probability at -5 dB SNR and 3 mm root mean square error (RMSE) at 25 dB SNR.

Accurate geometric calibration is essential for fluoroscopy-guided spinal imaging, digitally reconstructed radiograph (DRR) generation, and 2D--3D vertebral registration. Although calibration quality is typically evaluated using reconstruction-based metrics such as reprojection error, its influence on projection-domain consistency remains poorly understood. This study presents a synthetic framework for evaluating how intrinsic calibration perturbations affect vertebral fluoroscopic projections and downstream registration performance. CT-derived vertebral models and controlled cone-beam imaging geometry were used to generate DRRs with both ground-truth and perturbed intrinsic calibration parameters while maintaining identical anatomy and acquisition pose. Projection-domain changes were quantified using anatomical landmark displacement, contour distance, silhouette overlap, image similarity, and landmark-based 2D--3D registration accuracy in anterior--posterior (AP) and lateral (LAT) views. Results show that even small intrinsic calibration perturbations produce measurable changes in vertebral projection geometry, contour morphology, landmark localization, and DRR appearance. Sensitivity is strongly view dependent, with LAT projections exhibiting substantially greater deformation and anatomical displacement than AP projections. These projection inconsistencies also degrade downstream 2D--3D registration, particularly rotational alignment accuracy. The findings demonstrate that projection-domain consistency complements conventional reconstruction-based calibration metrics and provides a practical framework for assessing calibration robustness. This approach may improve the reliability of DRR generation and fluoroscopy-guided vertebral registration in image-guided spinal applications.

Machine anomalous sound detection (ASD) requires robust audio representations capable of capturing subtle deviations in machine sounds under limited supervision. Existing pre-trained audio backbones do not fully capture frequency-specific characteristics of machine sounds. To address this, we propose ECHOv2, a band-splitting model that learns localized intra-band representations to capture fine-grained spectral patterns while also incorporating a two-level self-distillation strategy with explicit inter-band supervision to model cross-frequency dependencies. The inter-band branch performs global context alignment and masked sub-band reconstruction, and multiple summary tokens are introduced for structured aggregation with controllable frequency granularity, enabling region-aware interaction across sub-bands during training. This design allows ECHOv2 to robustly handle diverse machine types and noisy operating conditions while maintaining stable representation quality. To enable fair and consistent evaluation of pre-trained audio backbones, we establish a unified ASD benchmark over DCASE 2020-2025 with two complementary protocols: embedding-based evaluation for frozen representation discriminability and adaptation-based evaluation for downstream transferability. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of intra-band learning, inter-band supervision, and structured aggregation granularity for robust ASD representation learning. These findings demonstrate that structured cross-band modeling provides a powerful and adaptable framework for ASD representation learning and can serve as a strong foundation for future research. The model and benchmark are fully open-sourced at this https URL and this https URL to promote reproducible research.

Objective intelligibility metrics (OIMs) enable fast and low-cost evaluation of speech intelligibility and are widely used in speech technology assessment. In this study, we evaluate five reference-based OIMs (STOI, ESTOI, STGI, HASPI, and SIIB) and two deep learning-based no-reference metrics (MOSA-Net+ and W2V-SIP) on SpInt, a new Spanish speech intelligibility dataset. Our results show that reference-based OIMs consistently outperform modern data-driven no-reference approaches, which degrade notably under training-test acoustic mismatches such as language mismatch. This effect is particularly relevant in our scenario, as none of the evaluated metrics were exposed to Spanish speech data during development. Consequently, to foster research on more robust and generalizable no-reference OIMs, SpInt is released publicly.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown strong potential for ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) reconstruction in ideal noise-free environments, yet existing DNNs are vulnerable to the noisy conditions in clinical practice, as they equally treat inputs that suffer mild, moderate, or severe noise. More challenging, the distributions of noise shift along with the environment, indicating the less effectiveness of noise-aware training, which injects a specific noise distribution into the training data. We rethink these challenges and observe that the DNN models can become more robust to noise if we know the noise sources and filter them out. This filtering operation is very alike the Multiplexers (or MUX), a fundamental combinational circuit in digital logic design. However, the challenge here is that noise can happen randomly during inference; as a result, the manually predefined MUX cannot work. To address these challenges, we propose MUX-USCT, a novel encoder-decoder DNN architecture that encodes the known acoustic acquisition geometry with an "adaptive MUX" that can automatically identify and filter noise, where the attention mechanism is applied in reconstructing the speed-of-sound map. On the OpenPros benchmark, MUX-USCT reaches 6.88 m/s MAE with 17% fewer parameters than the leading baseline with 7.65 m/s of MAE. Under simulated clinical noise, it remains stable across diverse degradation types that cause geometry-agnostic baselines to fail. Results show that the attention distributions in MUX-USCT provide interpretable indicators of the signal quality between pairs of transducers.

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.

Radar cross-section (RCS) reduction is a fundamental requirement in modern stealth technology, playing a critical role in the low-observable performance of aerial and naval platforms. Among the various passive RCS reduction strategies, including radar-absorbing materials, absorptive coatings, and artificially engineered surfaces, metasurface-based cross-polarization conversion has emerged as a compelling approach owing to its structural simplicity and low profile. In this work, a single-layer cross-polarization conversion (CPC) metasurface developed on a cost-effective FR4 dielectric substrate (relative permittivity 4.4, loss tangent 0.02) is proposed for multiband RCS reduction. The designed structure achieves a polarization conversion ratio (PCR) exceeding 95% at three distinct operating frequencies of 7.8 GHz, 11.7 GHz, and 18 GHz, spanning the C-, X-, and Ku-bands, which directly translates into a monostatic RCS reduction exceeding 10 dBsm at the corresponding bands. The metasurface further demonstrates stable polarization conversion performance under oblique incidence up to 60 degrees, confirming its suitability for wide-angle illumination conditions encountered in practical deployment scenarios. Experimental validation conducted in an anechoic chamber confirms close agreement with full-wave electromagnetic simulations, substantiating the reliability of the fabricated prototype. The proposed design offers a lightweight, low-cost, and high-performance candidate for multiband stealth and low-observable platform applications.

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and experimental validation of a compact monopulse direction-finding (DF) receiver operating in the X-band. The receiver combines a $2 \times 2$ antipodal Vivaldi antenna array with a rat-race (180-degree hybrid) comparator network that simultaneously synthesizes the sum ($\Sigma$), azimuth-difference ($\Delta_{az}$), and elevation-difference ($\Delta_{el}$) channels required for monopulse processing, removing the need for mechanical scanning. The Vivaldi element provides good impedance matching across 8-12 GHz with a simulated realized gain of approximately 6.44 dBi, and the comparator exhibits the 180-degree phase balance at its difference ports required for angle encoding, with the fabricated prototype preserving the matched, balanced response measured across the band. Three LTC5564 envelope detectors convert the channel outputs to DC voltages that are digitized by an on-board microcontroller and processed in software to form the monopulse ratios and estimate the direction of arrival (DoA), with the result displayed in real time on a MATLAB graphical user interface. Azimuth direction finding is experimentally demonstrated over fourteen angles spanning -20 to 19 degrees at 11 GHz, yielding a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of 7 degrees; the architecture is directly extensible to elevation. The result is a passive, low-cost, and fully integrated receiver suitable for radar sensing, electronic warfare, and surveillance.

A low-overhead site-specific multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) beamforming framework is proposed. Conventional limited-feedback MU-MIMO relies on channel state information reference signal (CSI-RS) transmission and user feedback before grouping and beamforming, which requires substantial online overhead when the antenna dimension and candidate-user pool are large. To reduce this burden, the proposed framework exploits site-specific information (SSI), which captures local radio propagation features. By learning the mapping from low-overhead beam-domain observations to effective transmit spatial subspaces of users, the BS can infer inter-user separability before high-resolution CSI acquisition and construct a compact group-level CSI acquisition subspace for the selected users. This site-specific design can be implemented within the standard limited-feedback procedure using synchronization signal block (SSB)-based reference signal received power (RSRP) fingerprints for subspace inference and CSI-RS feedback for low-dimensional CSI refinement. Extensive numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework can identify compatible user groups before CSI-RS acquisition, preserve most scheduled-user channel energy in a compact group subspace, and achieve higher effective rates than conventional systems with significantly lower overhead and user-side processing burden.

Automated assessment of second language (L2) speaking proficiency relies on large-scale annotated speech data, which remains scarce compared to widely available written learner corpora. A promising direction for addressing this imbalance is to use text-to-speech (TTS) and voice cloning to convert written L2 production into synthetic speech. However, written and spoken L2 differ fundamentally: spontaneous speech includes disfluencies and discourse markers, while writing is more planned and complex. This raises the question of what is required to generate synthetic L2 speech suitable for assessment. We address this through a systematic analysis of speaker-text relationships using COREFL, a publicly available corpus containing paired spoken and written responses from the same L2 learners to the same questions across modalities. In our proposed framework, we first address the structural differences between written and spoken language by transforming written responses into spoken-style transcripts ("speechification") using a large language model. These transcripts are then converted into speech using a TTS/voice-cloning model. To assign a voice to each synthetic response, we investigate different speaker-text pairing strategies based on shared learner attributes (proficiency level, first language, both, or neither). We evaluate our data augmentation techniques on the language assessment task, with improvements shown in both wav2vec2 (audio-based) and ModernBERT (text-based) scoring systems. Results show that matching speakers and texts by proficiency level yields the most robust synthetic speech. Moreover, raw written text leads to a strong mismatch with spoken language, while speechification substantially reduces this gap and improves grading performance.

This work is concerned with the development of control strategies for the Direct Internal Recycling Loop (DIRL) system, which is an essential part of the Tritium Fuel Cycle (TFC) for the fueling of fusion reactors. As a first step, a control-oriented model is developed that describes dynamic behavior of DIRL with interactions between the torus reactor, buffer and fuel units, and recirculation streams. This model is used to evaluate the controllability, stability of the DIRL, and interactions between input and output variables. Moreover, the direct recycling of isotopes from the exhaust gases is discussed from a control perspective. It is observed that Gas Distribution and Storage (GDS) within the DIRL is associated with significant control challenges due to input-output interactions and competing process objectives. Three control strategies are developed and evaluated for the GDS of the European Demonstration fusion power plant (EU-DEMO): a Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) control scheme, a redesigned GDS configuration with extended input variables enabling decentralised Single Input Single Output (SISO) control, and an extended-input MIMO control scheme addressing protium dilution. All strategies are assessed against three control objectives: maintaining GDS pressure around a prescribed set-point to ensure process safety; regulating the tritium-deuterium fuelling ratio for optimal reactor operation; and managing protium concentration to prevent fuelling dilution.

Battery electrical tab cooling is effective at reducing internal thermal gradients by exploiting the high thermal conductivity of the current collectors, whereas surface cooling is effective at reducing temperature rise because of its large heat transfer area. Using either strategy alone, however, limits the achievable trade-off between thermal uniformity and temperature rise reduction. This work proposes an integrated tab-surface cooling (ITSC) system in which coolant is dynamically allocated among the lateral surface and tab channels. The allocation is formulated as an optimal control problem in which the battery temperature is regulated towards a desired reference and thermal gradients are minimised. To support this formulation, a first-principles coolant model is developed and coupled with battery and valve-actuation models. The resulting optimal coolant-allocation problem is solved using a computationally efficient real-time iteration model predictive control (RTI-MPC) scheme, with a nonlinear MPC serving as a closed-loop performance benchmark. Evaluation results under realistic driving conditions showed that RTI-MPC reproduces the nonlinear MPC thermal response with absolute errors below 0.0035 degC while reducing the computational cost from several seconds to 19.3 ms, indicating strong potential for real-time implementation. Additionally, evaluation of the proposed ITSC system against conventional cooling configurations demonstrates that ITSC achieves the best overall trade-off between temperature regulation and thermal gradient reduction.

We study the problem of joint compression and detection in distributed sensing systems, motivated by applications such as device-to-device connectivity in IoT networks and distributed radar. In such systems, spatially separated sensors must collaboratively decide whether their observations stem from a common underlying signal, while communicating over highly bandwidth-limited links. We consider a fundamental, insightful model in which one sensor (the encoder) observes a continuous-time realization of a stationary bandlimited Gaussian process, while the other sensor (the decoder) observes a delayed and noisy version of that signal, with an unknown delay. The encoder is allowed to transmit only a $k$-bit message to the decoder to assist in making a binary decision: either the observations are statistically independent, or they are time-shifted noisy versions of the same signal. We propose a low-complexity extremum-based scheme that exploits the structure of the signal to enable reliable decision-making under tight communication constraints. We derive nonasymptotic upper bounds on the false alarm and mis-detection probabilities of our method, as well as a simplified asymptotic bound for the latter. Representative simulations demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the prevalent 1-bit-per-sample quantization baseline and a Fisher-information-based compression benchmark, while closely approaching an information-theoretic (nonrealizable) rate-distortion benchmark.

We investigate the detection and accommodation of sensor faults for a proton exchange membrane electrolyzer coupled to a DC/DC converter powered by renewable energy sources. The proposed method for detecting and accommodating the sensor fault is model-free and is based on the concept of ultra-local model that is becoming classic in control engineering. The existing literature on active control tolerant to sensor fault dedicated to this question shows that no previous work has addressed this topic. Our approach mitigates the effect of sensor fault on closed-loop behavior and guarantees the stability and performance of the overall system. Numerical simulations under variations in renewable energy sources validate our approach.

We introduce a graph bispectrum formulation for characterizing higher-order interactions in graph signals. While conventional graph spectral methods capture only second-order structure, many graph signals exhibit nonlinear interactions that are not reflected in covariance or graph power spectra. Motivated by classical higher-order spectral analysis, we define a graph bispectrum tensor based on third-order moments of graph Fourier coefficients and derive a compact graph bicoherence measure that summarizes nonlinear mode interactions in a low-dimensional and scale-invariant form. We establish key properties of the proposed quantities, including vanishing third-order moments for Gaussian graph signals and a dynamical interpretation in terms of nonlinear mode coupling. Experiments on synthetic random graph signals demonstrate that the proposed measures detect complementary nonlinear dependencies even when second-order statistics are similar. We further apply the method to EEG recordings from the CHB-MIT Scalp EEG Database and show that ictal activity exhibits substantially increased nonlinear graph spectral coupling compared to interictal periods. The proposed approach provides an interpretable and computationally efficient tool for higher-order interaction analysis for graph signals.

Certifying the safety of a control action in real time, from streaming partial observations of a nonlinear, interconnected system under non-stationary disturbances, is a problem no existing data-driven framework solves. Batch methods such as data-enabled predictive control require a pre-collected dataset and offer no stability certificate for nonlinear dynamics; informativity-based approaches characterize data sufficiency offline and non-recursively; neither exploits the known graph topology of networked systems as a structural prior. This paper addresses both limitations. First, we develop a streaming contraction certificate beta_cert(t) = beta_hat(t) - rho(t), where beta_hat(t) is estimated recursively via integral regression on a sliding window of partial input-output observations, and rho(t) is a data-dependent uncertainty radius mapping estimation error to a conservative bound on the true closed-loop contraction rate. The certificate issues a provably safe deployment signal the moment beta_cert(t) crosses and sustains above zero. Second, we introduce a topology-aware estimator enforcing known graph adjacency as exact zero constraints on the Jacobian, reducing the effective parameter count per row from O(N) to O(d_max) for maximum node degree d_max. On a five-node nonlinear benchmark under heavy-tailed Laplace disturbances with two observed nodes, the streaming certificate achieves certified deployment at t*=2.6s from 130 samples, 17 seconds earlier than an offline batch baseline, with 16x lower accumulated error during the unprotected window. The topology-aware estimator cuts certification time by 59% (1.62s vs 3.98s) and accumulated disturbance cost by 58%, with the advantage persisting across all window sizes below 40 samples. The framework is domain-agnostic and applies to any large-scale nonlinear networked system under streaming data and partial observations.

Reducing the response time for accurate emergency-caller localization is critical in vehicular and public-safety networks. Although mobile devices commonly use GNSS, Wi-Fi, or cellular positioning, their accuracy and availability can degrade because of poor signal reception, limited infrastructure, and regulatory constraints. UAV-based localization offers a promising alternative by using airborne sensors to cooperatively estimate the target position. However, existing Fisher information matrix (FIM)-based trajectory optimization methods depend on the current target estimate and can perform poorly in the early mission stage, when measurements are limited and uncertainty is high. We propose a rigidity-based UAV trajectory optimization method that maximizes the smallest nonzero singular value of the rigidity matrix associated with the UAV-target sensing graph, improving geometric conditioning and reducing position ambiguity. We also introduce a pruning-based matrix reduction strategy for efficient real-time implementation. Simulations show that the proposed method reduces search time by 32.9% compared with FIM-based methods and satisfies the FCC horizontal emergency-localization requirement sooner. Further results demonstrate scalability, robustness to UAV positioning errors and NLOS path loss, low sensitivity to heading parameters, practical computation and communication costs, and more stable degradation than PPO-based baselines under severe sensing and navigation perturbations.

Optimal Transmission Switching (OTS) reduces generation cost by strategically opening transmission lines, but its mixed-integer linear program (MILP) formulation scales poorly for large-scale transmission networks. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a computationally efficient alternative, but existing RL-based OTS approaches rely on soft penalties that permit physical constraint violations. This paper presents a comparison between an RL framework and an MILP-based optimization method for OTS. Case studies were carried out on the IEEE RTS-96 24-bus system; results show that the agent was able to produce near-optimal solutions at low switching budgets and tended to yield suboptimal solutions at high switching budgets. However, the RL agent was able to generate feasible solutions two-to-three orders of magnitude faster than the optimization solver.

In this paper, a multidisciplinary design optimization problem under uncertainty is formulated for wave energy converter array. An array of heaving point absorbers for grid-scale energy production with decision variables and parameters chosen from the coupled disciplines of geometry, hydrodynamics, layout, and trajectory optimization thus resulting in a control co-design formulation of the plant and the control together. We study the benefits of MDO as applied to WEC farm layout optimization. We vary the wave energy converter (WEC) dimensions, array layout, and control gain to minimize the power per volume. Uncertainty in the electrical power is handled using regression based on polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) method at each design iteration. Traditional WEC farm design optimization approaches often neglect the multidisciplinary, coupled nature of WECs and the inherent uncertainty in ocean wave conditions and control responses. This leads to designs that may under perform in real-world environments. In this work, we address this limitation by incorporating uncertainty directly into the design optimization process using the technique of polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) to quantify the variability of the performance due to uncertain wave environment.

This paper introduces a hierarchical control architecture for multi-agent adversarial environments, decoupling strategic task planning from rigorous safety assurance. The system formulates pursuit-evasion as a zero-sum receding-horizon game, solved via an iterative minimax \acl{mpc} scheme. This allows pursuers to anticipate and block evader trajectories using transverse velocity penalties rather than relying on reactive heuristic formations. To guarantee collision-free operation without compromising the convexity of the \acl{mpc}, a discrete-time \acl{cbf} operates as an inner-loop safety filter. Through simulated experiments, we demonstrate the framework's adaptability. By simply altering the weights of the shared zero-sum payoff and \acl{cbf} constraints, the swarm can fluidly switch from aggressive pursuit-evasion tactics to strict perimeter defense and area denial, demonstrating robust performance across varying rules of engagement without structural changes to the control logic. The source code is available: this https URL.

Holographic multiple-input multiple-output (HMIMO) has emerged as a promising technology for future wireless systems by enabling continuous electromagnetic (EM) field control over large apertures. However, user-side EM exposure has become an increasingly important concern in large-scale array systems. This paper addresses this issue by developing a multiuser uplink HMIMO model, where a physically consistent specific absorption rate (SAR) model is established to quantify the EM exposure. On this basis, a spectral efficiency (SE) maximization problem is addressed by developing a modified iterative water-filling algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm effectively improves the system SE while satisfying the SAR constraints.

This paper investigates acoustic intensity estimation using pairs of cardioid microphones based on the cardioid-cardioid (C-C) method. Unlike conventional pressure-difference techniques, the C-C method is intrinsically less sensitive to the relationship between microphone spacing and acoustic wavelength. However, practical microphones inevitably deviate from ideal cardioid directivity, producing direction-dependent estimation errors. To improve robustness against such errors, a measurement framework based on spherical tight-frame microphone configurations is proposed. Directional intensity components measured along multiple axes are combined to reconstruct the three-dimensional acoustic intensity vector. Furthermore, directivity errors are represented using Legendre polynomial and spherical harmonic expansions, and a geometry-dependent leakage metric is introduced to quantify the error-suppression capability of different microphone arrangements. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that tight-frame configurations effectively suppress direction-dependent errors through geometric averaging. The proposed leakage metric successfully predicts the influence of microphone directivity imperfections on the reconstructed intensity vector. The results further indicate that accurate wide-band acoustic-intensity estimation can be achieved even with relatively large microphone spacings, which are generally impractical in conventional pressure-difference approaches. % The proposed framework provides a physically interpretable and practically useful approach for acoustic intensity measurement using directional microphone arrays.

In mountainous regions where traction loads constitute a significant portion of a long-chain weak power grid (PG) with sustainable energy, the interaction between the traction power supply system and the PG becomes increasingly evident. The integrated power flow calculation (PFC) method and its linearized model are quite important for the PG - traction network (TN) joint planning. However, existing research on the port load characteristics of the EMUs and the connection angle characteristics of traction transformers is insufficient, and there is a lack of effective methods for PFC or linearized PFC in systems that couple the PG with the traction network. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an integrated PFC model for the AT TN - PG coupled system, along with a linearized method. Firstly, according to the relationship of the phases between the PG and the AT traction network, the node admittance matrix of the coupled system has been constructed. Then, the issue of power injection equations being unable to deal with the EMUs port load is resolved by merging the contact line node and the rail node. Subsequently, the integrated PFC equations for the coupling system are established. Next, a hybrid phase linear decoupled power flow model for the coupling system is developed, employing the correspondence between the phases of the PG and the TN, as well as the phase angle differences among various nodes and branches. Numerical simulations conducted in a specific region demonstrate the necessity of an integrated PFC for the coupled system and validate both the accuracy and efficiency of the linearized model.

The double-sided power supply railway system increases the simultaneous operation of vehicles on the grid, potentially causing system instability and oscillation overvoltage issues. As vehicles frequently switch operating points during operation, it is essential to analyze system stability across a wide range of conditions. Therefore, accurately identifying the black-box impedance of vehicle converters at multiple operating points is crucial for studying railway vehicle-grid system stability. However, traditional impedance identification methods require extensive data and lack interpretability, leading to significant computational and data burdens. This study introduces an interpretable residual feedforward neural network (ResFNN) combined with SHapley Additive exPlanations for training vehicle impedance models, reducing data requirements while maintaining accuracy. Additionally, a component connection method is proposed for deriving the impedance matrix of a multivehicle railway system under the double-sided feeding mode. This method incorporates the dynamic mobility of vehicles and their positional distribution, and it utilizes the ResFNN to identify impedance for stability analysis. Real operational data from actual railway lines is used as case study to analyze the stability of the double-sided power supply railway system. The results demonstrate that this approach accurately assesses both lowfrequency and high-frequency instability issues.

Implicit neural controllers (INCs) are static feedback laws that are evaluated through an algebraic fixed point {equation}; they include as special cases neural network controllers. We propose a so-called implicit representation of neural networks as a key enabling device that exposes the controller as a trainable linear interconnection closed through a known static activation map, thereby making well-posedness and Lyapunov/IQC analysis mathematically easy to handle. For finite-dimensional LTI plants, we first develop a rigorous analysis theory for a given INC, including Perron--Frobenius and norm conditions for well posedness, LMI/IQC certificates for exponential stability, and LMIs for discounted infinite-horizon quadratic performance. We then formulate synthesis as a certification-compatible heuristic search: training is carried out under explicit well-posedness constraints, implicit-differentiation formulas provide gradients, and the resulting controller is accepted only after independent post-training LMIs or regional admissibility checks are feasible. Finally, we establish constrained-control separation results: for a specific scalar unstable plant with hard actuator bounds, an INC achieves a strictly smaller discounted infinite-horizon cost than any admissible finite-order dynamic linear controller. Additional results cover quadratic state-input costs, comparison with linear static output feedback, and computable upper/lower-bound certificates. Numerical examples illustrate the mechanism and the resulting certified performance.

Speech enhancement (SE) can substantially improve perceptual quality, yet enhanced speech does not necessarily improve automatic speech recognition (ASR). Existing remedies, such as retraining the enhancer jointly with recognizer or interpolating enhanced speech with the noisy input, can mitigate this mismatch, but common explanations such as artifacts and over-suppression remain qualitative and do not localize which enhancement component harms recognition. We propose inference time polar projection, a diagnosis for STFT domain enhancement. Given a mask $M=Ae^{j\phi}$, polar projection forms $M_{\alpha,\gamma}=A^\alpha e^{j\gamma\phi}$, where $\alpha$ controls magnitude strength and $\gamma$ controls phase correction. Sweeping these controls on frozen SE and ASR models turns ASR degradation into measurable magnitude and phase effects. Our projection analysis shows that magnitude strength is the operative axis, while estimated phase correction provides no recognition benefit. The optimal magnitude strength is recognizer dependent: waveform-input wav2vec2.0 favors strong correction, whereas log-Mel-input, noise-robust Whisper prefers weaker correction. Finally, the projection provides a simple mitigation for any SE front end in the STFT mask domain, without retraining either the enhancer or the recognizer, making it directly useful for voice assistants and agents that rely on enhanced speech.

Reconfigurable distributed antennas and reflecting surface (RDARS) has recently emerged as a promising architecture for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), owing to its flexible element-wise mode switching between connection and reflection modes. In this paper, to fully reap the benefits of mode configuration, muting elements that can absorb the incident energy are introduced into RDARS-aided ISAC systems to mitigate multi-user interference (MUI) and enhance sensing performance. To draw useful insights, we first investigate the special cases of single-UE communication, single-target sensing, and two-UE communication to reveal the importance of muting elements. Specifically, the maximum communication and sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) expressions are respectively derived for the three cases, together with the optimal number of muting elements for explicitly characterizing the tradeoff between reflection gain loss and MUI suppression. Next, we consider the joint waveform and tri-mode switching design for RDARS-aided ISAC systems, where an alternating optimization (AO)-based penalty dual decomposition (APDD) algorithm is proposed to solve the mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem. Furthermore, a model-driven APDD-Net is developed by deeply unfolding the APDD iterations into a layer-wise architecture, where key parameters are learned to reduce the computational complexity and accelerate convergence. Simulation results verify the theoretical findings on the muting gain and demonstrate that the proposed APDD-Net achieves a better tradeoff between communication and sensing performance compared with benchmark schemes.

We study recovery control in replicated computing systems. Such systems consist of replicas that collectively provide a service to a client population. This redundancy enables the system to withstand failures provided that failed replicas are recovered faster than new failures occur. We show that the problem of deciding when to initiate recovery of selected replicas can be formulated as a partially observable Markov decision problem (POMDP) with a multiagent structure. We exploit this structure to apply a multiagent rollout method for approximating optimal control policies. Our method uses precomputed signaling information that reduces the need for replica coordination and facilitates parallel computations. Experiments show that our method scales to systems with up to 70 replicas and reduces costs compared to the recovery policies currently used in practice.

The electrical incompatibility between vehicles and traction network in railway system can result in system instability and oscillation overvoltage issues. To analyze the system stability, impedance-based frequency-domain methods are commonly used. However, the current impedance-based modeling methods face challenges in practical implementation due to the requirement of precise analytical models and detailed internal parameters for all vehicles. Moreover, multiple vehicles operate simultaneously in railway systems, each with different operating conditions and internal parameters, thereby influencing system stability to different extents. Therefore, it is crucial to accurately identify the critical vehicles to prevent resonance accidents. To address these challenges, a component connection-based modeling approach for the railway vehicle-grid system is proposed, which only requires the measured impedance results without the internal information of vehicles. In addition, a multilevel sensitivity analysis method is introduced to quantitatively identify the critical vehicles and internal parameters that influence system stability, which outperforms traditional sensitivity analysis methods in computational complexity. Furthermore, a system-level electrical compatibility test process for the railway vehicle-grid system is provided, incorporating the proposed stability and sensitivity analysis methods. Finally, case studies based on the real-world train schedule of a multivehicle-accessed railway vehicle-grid system are designed to verify the correctness of the proposed method.

Sampling determines the form of information available to downstream reconstruction systems. Conventional lowrate sampling forms finite-dimensional observations directly from the raw waveform, with the sampling rule mainly guided by bandwidth, sparsity, or fixed signal-level structures. For acoustic signals such as speech, however, reconstruction-relevant information is often expressed through content-related spectral-temporal structures rather than waveform samples alone. This paper proposes semantic sampling via learnable observation front ends, where finite-dimensional observations are generated from learned signal responses instead of directly subsampled waveform points. The proposed front end consists of a semantic feature filterbank, a constrained semantic observation matrix, and a low-rate readout module. The filterbank maps the input waveform into multiple acoustic response channels, the observation matrix combines these responses into a small number of observation channels, and the readout module produces low-rate finite-dimensional samples. A reconstruction network is then used to recover the signal from the resulting observations. Experiments on low-rate speech reconstruction show that, under the same observation budget, the proposed semantic sampling front end provides more informative observations than fixed low-rate sampling and neural restoration methods based on predetermined low-rate waveforms. The improvements in waveform fidelity, spectral consistency, and perceptual quality show that learnable observation front ends preserve more useful information for acoustic signal reconstruction under the same observation budget.

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is acquired as part of bi-parametric prostate MRI, but suffers from artifacts that degrade downstream quantitative and diagnostic performance. While DWI preprocessing is standard in brain imaging, its adoption in prostate imaging remains limited and lacks standardized pipelines. This study investigated the effect of different DWI preprocessing strategies on apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) estimation and automatic Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS) classification. 268 cases were derived from the fastMRI prostate cohort by sequentially applying denoising, Gibbs-ringing correction, and diffeomorphic registration for susceptibility distortion correction. ADC maps were compared using linear least squares (LLS) and iteratively-weighted LLS (IWLLS). A 3-class DenseNet classifier was trained to predict PI-RADS scores from multi-channel MRI inputs. ADC analysis revealed statistically significant differences across preprocessing pipelines, with LLS and IWLLS producing numerically equivalent maps. Linear relationships between ADC values were preserved across most datasets (PCC ~0.99), while distortion correction realigned DWI to T2w anatomy and altered ADC values accordingly (PCC ~0.90). Classification showed the best AUROC and sensitivity for high-risk PI-RADS classes in the fully processed dataset. False-negative analysis revealed this dataset produced the least overconfident incorrect predictions on high-risk classes, which is a desirable property for clinical triage. DWI preprocessing, particularly distortion correction, enhances both ADC map quality and the predictive power of deep learning models for PI-RADS classification, supporting the need for optimized preprocessing pipelines in prostate MRI.

Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) operating on lane-free highways offer substantial gains in traffic efficiency. However, their inherent nonlinear dynamics and the presence of coupled, nonconvex safety constraints present critical challenges to control design. Centralized Model Predictive Control (MPC) ensures safety, but suffers from scalability and communication limitations. To address these challenges, this paper investigates decentralized MPC (DMPC) for CAV coordination, focusing on iterative, non-cooperative algorithms, including Jacobi-type and Gauss-Seidel-type. A novel decoupling method is developed to transform nonconvex safety constraints into convex, locally enforceable constraints, inspired by buffered Voronoi cells. The simulation results show that the proposed DMPC algorithms achieve safe and efficient vehicle trajectories while substantially improving scalability, highlighting their potential for future lane-free CAV traffic systems. Ultimately, the results indicate that the most suitable decentralized control strategy depends on the desired trade-off between safety, performance, and computational efficiency.

Distributed wireless spiking neural networks (DWSNNs) are a promising paradigm for energy-efficient edge inference in resource-constrained environments such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Yet, two limitations persist: their internal decision process is opaque, and their residual energy footprint remains a limiting factor for ultra-low-power deployments. This paper proposes a systematic methodology to convert a trained DWSNN into an equivalent Spiking Neural P (SN P) system, a biologically-inspired, rule-based computational model drawn from membrane computing, by extracting symbolic firing rules from the hidden-layer spike activity. The resulting SN P system provides direct, human-readable decision explanations while consuming three orders of magnitude less energy than its parent SNN. Experiments on the Neuromorphic MNIST (N-MNIST) dataset with a two-layer fully connected SNN using phase encoding and Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons show that the SN P system retains approximately 84% of the original classification accuracy (73.77% vs. 87.68%) while the output layer connectivity decreases from 1000 to 120 class-specific connections. This complexity reduction is governed by a parameter related to the number of relevant hidden neurons per class that can be chosen according to a trade-off between computational complexity reduction and output accuracy. These results position SN P systems as lightweight, interpretable surrogates for trained distributed wireless SNNs in neuromorphic edge deployments.

Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs) in space and extreme environments must reliably transmit diverse analog physical signals over resource-constrained fading channels, subject to bandwidth limitations, power budgets, and reconstruction quality requirements. This paper addresses two fundamental questions: (i) what is the minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) a sensing link must sustain to reconstruct an analog signal at a prescribed distortion, regardless of the decoder used, and (ii) how can knowledge of the signal's intrinsic structure be exploited to jointly allocate power and bandwidth across an HWSN? Both questions are answered through the Renyi information dimension (RID), which quantifies the intrinsic complexity of an analog source distribution. By combining the RID with rate-distortion theory and Shannon channel capacity, a closed-form SNR lower bound is derived, parameterized solely by the source RID. Building on these foundations, a cross-layer resource allocation framework is introduced that exploits the per-node RID to jointly assign transmit power and bandwidth, achieving strict power saving relative to a Gaussian-assumption baseline while guaranteeing prescribed reconstruction quality and outage constraints at every node.

Reliable electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring in wearable and space environments requires effective denoising of signals corrupted by non-stationary electromyogram (EMG) interference. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of model-based and DL-based denoising techniques for upper-arm ECG recordings acquired under real conditions. The model-based methods include three empirical mode decomposition (EMD) variants and a discrete wavelet transform (DWT) approach, while the deep learning (DL) side is represented by a stacked denoising autoencoder (SDAE) and a physics-informed neural network (PINN). All methods are evaluated on real acquisitions under both relaxed and voluntary muscle contraction conditions, using root mean squared error (RMSE), Pearson correlation, and peak-to-peak signal-to-noise ratio (PPSNR) as performance metrics. Results reveal a fundamental trade-off: DL methods achieve superior morphological reconstruction, while DWT provides the strongest noise suppression, highlighting complementary strengths for wearable cardiac monitoring applications.

This paper presents the mAIEnergy dataset, an open-access, multimodal corpus developed to support Large Language Model (LLM) applications in the energy sector. The dataset integrates approximately 50,000 textual documents, 20,000 images, 25 million numerical time series records, and 2 million geospatial and relational data entries. It includes policy and regulatory texts, scientific articles and news articles, satellite and contextual imagery, electricity system measurements, weather observations, statistical indicators, and geospatial representations of energy infrastructure and related entities. All data have been harmonized into structured, ready-to-use formats, accompanied by consistent metadata and reproducible data retrieval and preparation workflows. The dataset can serve as a foundational energy knowledge base, allowing energy stakeholders to integrate additional open-source or proprietary data. The mAIEnergy dataset adheres to Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles, enhancing its applicability for AI-driven energy research, modeling, and decision-making.

A planar dual-band reconfigurable shared-aperture antenna array is proposed for compact next-generation wireless front ends that require both sub-6-GHz and centimeter-wave (cm-wave) coverage. The array integrates a 2 by 2 sub-6-GHz microstrip dipole array and a 4 by 4 cm-wave stacked patch array within the same aperture, while providing independent beam control in the two bands without conventional T/R modules or beamforming networks. Slot-coupled feeding is employed to separate the radiating aperture from the reconfigurable RF feeding networks and DC bias circuits. PIN-diode-loaded split feeding rings first provide independent 1-bit phase reconfigurability for both bands. A compact reconfigurable $90^{\circ}$ phase shifter is then introduced as an additional phase-control stage, resulting in 2-bit phase control for sub-6 GHz elements and cm-wave subarrays. To reduce cross-band coupling in the compact shared aperture, a double-layer electromagnetic band-gap (EBG) structure is used to suppress cm-wave surface waves and higher-order sub-6-GHz modes excited by the cm-wave elements. A prototype is fabricated and measured. In the sub-6-GHz band, 11 reconfigurable radiation patterns are obtained, including two difference patterns and nine directional beams, with a peak broadside gain of 10.5 dBi. In the cm-wave band, two-dimensional beam scanning up to $\pm40^{\circ}$ is demonstrated with a peak gain of 14.6 dBi in both the E-plane and H-plane. These results show that the proposed architecture can combine dual-band shared-aperture integration and independent reconfigurable beam control in a compact antenna platform.

We study trajectory prediction from libraries of stored output templates. Given the past of an unknown trajectory, the goal is to predict its future without identifying the state-space model that generated it. We show that libraries of trajectories generated by one or more dynamical systems define behavioral spaces that can be used as prediction mechanisms. For linear systems, we characterize exact prediction in terms of continuation maps, behavioral containment, and spectral conditions on output-visible eigenvalues. We also analyze robustness to noisy observations and noisy libraries, derive error bounds for out-of-library trajectories, and show how interconnection constraints can compose template libraries into new behavioral spaces with emergent modes. Finally, we extend the framework to nonlinear systems whose output trajectories are contained in, or immersed into, finite-dimensional linear behaviors. These results provide a theory of template-based prediction machines capable of generalizing beyond the stored trajectories and, in some cases, beyond the systems that generated them.

This paper presents a computationally lightweight scaling model for cylindrical lithium-ion battery cells, intended for early-stage battery design-space exploration. The model maps selected geometric and electrode-level design variables, including cell height, cell diameter, cathode active loading, and cathode porosity, to cell-level performance indicators such as capacity, DC internal resistance, mass, volume, and winding length. The scaling model is validated against available cylindrical cell data by comparing predicted capacity, internal resistance, and winding length. The validated model is subsequently used in a single-cell design-space exploration and global sensitivity analysis to evaluate capacity, internal resistance, gravimetric energy density, and volumetric energy density. The results identify the dominant design variables, favourable parameter directions, and key trade-offs between cell geometry, electrode loading, resistance, and energy density. The proposed model provides a basis for future integration into higher-level battery system and vehicle optimization frameworks.

The present manuscript introduces a compact millimeter-wave dual-polarized reference antenna module designed for performance comparison of handset antenna arrays in multipath environments. Both vertically- and horizontally-polarized fields are covered with sufficiently wide impedance bandwidths and low gain variation along the horizontal plane. When integrated into a compact dual-polarized antenna module, the mutual coupling between the antennas is well controlled to ensure minimal distortion in the radiation patterns. Measurements confirm that the proposed antenna module achieves the designed low gain variation and almost identical realized gains for the two polarizations.

Interference is a limiting factor in the emerging dense low Earth orbit (LEO) networks. In the LEO network, the interference is spatially and temporally correlated. At narrow-beam LEO base stations (BSs), spatial interference can vary significantly, and multipath fading introduces temporal variation. While developing novel stochastic geometry analysis in a multibeam scenario, we explore spatio-temporal interference correlation in the LEO uplink. We derive a closed-form expression for the spatio-temporal interference correlation coefficient. As an application of the analysis, we show that the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) entails significant spatial clustering, which is especially prevalent if the beams are near-Gaussian, i.e., have weak side lobes and/or the side lobe interference/inter-cell interference is small, and large cell sizes. In this regard, we demonstrate that an appropriately designed grant-free random access scheme, particularly slotted ALOHA, can mitigate spatial SIR clustering over the beams while preserving average throughput. Furthermore, we propose a novel gamma distribution model for the interference power distribution and a Lomax distribution model for the SIR.

5G and Beyond-5G standards require digital predistortion (DPD) algorithms to operate on increased signal bandwidths. Wideband laboratory test hardware is cost-intensive, and openly available solutions lack flexibility. The OwnDPDLab provides a highly flexible, affordable, open-source, and openly accessible system. It is based on the RFSoC 4x2 and supports full control of center frequency, sampling mode, output power, and input attenuation at a signal bandwidth of up to 1 GHz. The system's capability is demonstrated by linearizing a laboratory power amplifier using a 196.608 MHz orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal with 256-QAM modulation using both a memory polynomial and an augmented real-valued time-delay neural network in the first and second Nyquist zone. The system achieves a normalized mean squared error improvement of up to 23 dB and an adjacent channel leakage ratio improvement of up to 11 dB, using DPD.

We investigate SIR distributions and order statistics of user equipments (UEs) at a typical low Earth orbit satellite base station (LEO BS) with narrow Gaussian antenna beams in the uplink. We analyze SIR distributions for the three strongest UEs under successive interference cancellation (SIC), using a Gaussian mixture shadowing model. The UEs are distributed on Earth according to a Poisson point process (PPP). We show that SIC enables each LEO BS to serve multiple UEs per beam cell, achieving simultaneously a good average network throughput and user fairness.

We introduce \textbf{Qwen-Audio-VAE}, a suite of low-bitrate, fast-encoding continuous audio autoencoders designed for scalable general audio generation. The model is built around a simple but important principle: an audio VAE should not only reconstruct diverse audio with high fidelity, but also produce compact latent representations fast enough to support large-scale text-to-audio training. Qwen-Audio-VAE combines a causal encoder-decoder, window Transformer blocks, and multi-discriminator training to achieve a strong balance between reconstruction quality and compression rate. The model is trained at scale on 5 million hours of multi-domain audio, enabling robust reconstruction across heterogeneous acoustic conditions. To further improve computational efficiency, we adopt an asymmetric encoder-decoder backbone and introduce latency-aware encoder pruning to maximize encoding throughput. Experiments on public speech, music, and sound reconstruction benchmarks show that Qwen-Audio-VAE generalizes well across diverse audio domains and is particularly efficient, requiring only 541 ms to encode 32 minutes of audio. Overall, Qwen-Audio-VAE provides a high-quality, compact, and high-throughput representation backbone for efficient general audio generation.

Graph neural network (GNN)-based precoding has demonstrated strong potential for scalable multi-user beamforming in multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems under space division multiple access (SDMA). However, direct extension to rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) is non-trivial due to the coupled common/private-stream structure inherent to RSMA, which requires a fundamentally different graph representation and permutation equivariance structure. Motivated by this, we propose a recurrent structure-preserving graph neural network (RS-GNN) for scalable RSMA precoding. RS-GNN constructs precoder-dependent graph features at every refinement layer, enabling closed-loop interference-aware message passing, and recovers the common and private precoders through an analytically grounded structure-based reconstruction via a differentiable linear solver. This design decouples the learnable parameters from fixed system dimensions, enabling generalization to unseen system sizes without retraining. We formally prove that RS-GNN satisfies mixed permutation equivariance with respect to both user and antenna orderings, and show that RS-GNN reduces to conventional SDMA precoding as a special case by deactivating the common-stream branch. Simulation results demonstrate that RS-GNN achieves near-WMMSE sum-rate performance with significantly lower online inference time, while generalizing robustly to unseen system sizes; its SDMA special case consistently outperforms existing GNN-based precoders across unseen antenna and user configurations, SNR regimes, and channel distributions.

Digital twin channel (DTC) aims to establish a real-time digital counterpart of physical wireless channels for reproducing and predicting site-specific propagation characteristics. As a high-precision channel computation method for realistic propagation scenarios, ray tracing (RT) serves as a key enabler for DTC construction. However, conventional RT suffers from high complexity under serial path-searching workflows. This letter proposes DeepRT Engine (DeepRT-E), a parallel RT acceleration architecture with a three-stage physically-inspired pipeline for real-time DTC construction. Firstly, DeepRT-E constructs a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) to partition the scene and reduce redundant ray-surface intersections. Secondly, the shooting and bouncing rays (SBR) algorithm is executed through a ray-level parallel tracing framework to identify candidate surface sequences and prune the search space of the image method (IM). Finally, a parallel batched IM solver refines the retained candidates for accurate propagation-path recovery. Simulation results show that DeepRT-E reduces runtime by 96.3% and achieves a converged error of only 0.001 dB, outperforming Wireless InSite and Sionna in efficiency and accuracy.

Modern neural speech systems can generate intelligible waveforms, but they usually hide the physical speech-production state that produced the sound. Conversely, biomechanical vocal-tract models expose articulatory structure, contact behavior, airflow routing, and geometric constraints, but direct physical waveform synthesis remains less robust than modern neural vocoders. A duration-preserving acoustic carrier supplies the listening waveform, while a corrected three-dimensional vocal-tract model supplies synchronized jaw, lip, tongue, velum, laryngeal, oral-airflow, and nasal-airflow motion. A joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA)-style representation and a reinforcement learning/cross-entropy method (RL/CEM) trajectory-selection loop align articulatory actions to the acoustic carrier and to physical-plausibility constraints. The evaluation contains 12 3D recordings covering 24 minimal-pair stimuli. On the 24-word set, the carrier obtains good automatic speech recognition (ASR) results (an 8.33\% WER, a 4.17\% CER), a UTMOS score of 3.174, a mean JEPA score of 0.864, and a mean timbre-guard score of 0.947.

Finite Reliability Representations (FRR) certify when a cell-constant policy is sufficient for reliable decision-making in a partially observed system with a known physical noise floor. In practice, however, sensing and execution noise can be latent and context-dependent. This paper develops a certificate-aware active disambiguation framework for an unknown physical noise parameter theta = (sigma_y, sigma_u), with the sensor-only case obtained by fixing sigma_u. We define the Value of Noise Information (VoNI) as the expected excess FRR certificate gap caused by using a reliability cover calibrated to the current estimate rather than to the realized noise parameter. We bound VoNI using action-value model mismatch and FRR radius inflation, showing that noise estimation has low decision value in sub-crossover regimes where the FRR certificate is insensitive to theta, but becomes valuable when posterior uncertainty can invalidate the current cover. A bi-level decision maker uses a posterior over theta, obtained from innovation statistics, execution residuals, or another online estimator, and triggers diagnostic probing only when uncertainty threatens the FRR certificate. We also interpret VoNI as a tractable, certificate-aware approximation to a high-level finite POMDP for latent sensing-execution regime disambiguation. Under stationary, identifiable, and persistently exciting regimes, we establish posterior consistency and convergence of the induced policy loss to the FRR approximation floor. Closed-loop UGV simulations with EKF-based innovation residuals show earlier detection of abrupt sensing-noise jumps, lower drift-tracking error, and substantially fewer probing actions than posterior-entropy exploration over 50 Monte Carlo trials.

Sensing and early detection of small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) are critically important in modern-day defense. In dense urban and indoor environments, detection becomes extremely challenging due to dense multipath, fading, low-altitude flight, and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) radio-frequency propagation. This paper presents a continuous-wave multiple-input multiple-output radar and a deep learning model for sUAS detection using NLOS signals. The radar operates at 2.47 GHz, and spectral correlation densities derived from rotational micro-Doppler signatures from the rotor blades are used as inputs to the deep learning model. Experimental results demonstrate an overall detection accuracy of $86.11\%$ across a dataset of five drone types, confirming the feasibility of sUAS detection in dense urban environments without direct line-of-sight conditions.

The baboon (Papio) is an invaluable resource within nonhuman primate research, having the advantage of being a cercopithecoid (Old World monkey) with one of the largest brains among non-hominid primates. In order to facilitate comparative developmental neuroscience research, we present the BABACOOL (BAby Brain Atlas COnstruction for Optimized Labeled segmentation) approach for creating multi-modal developmental atlases, which we used to produce BaBa21, a population-based longitudinal developmental baboon template. BaBa21 is a spatio-temporal template that consists of structural (T1- and T2-weighted) images and tissue probability maps from a population of 21 baboons (Papio anubis) scanned at 4 timepoints beginning from about 2 weeks after birth and continuing to sexual maturity (5 years). Further, his study offers a fully automatic method for generating a template at any intermediate age for future age-specific group studies. This resource is made available to provide a normalization target for baboon data across the lifespan, including intermediate timepoints, and moreover facilitate neuroimaging research in baboons, comparative research with humans and nonhuman primate species for which developmental templates are available (e.g., macaques).

A cheap swarm of unreliable agents can be steered to a correct consensus by a few strong, expensive "oracle" correctors. We ask how much one must spend, and where to place the oracles. We model the swarm as a consensus on a graph in which each oracle pins one node toward the truth at a cost-coupled, concave strength, and measure quality by the coherence H(R)=tr M(R)^{-1}. Our first result is that H stays submodular (each added oracle helps less than the last) even when the oracles differ in strength, so a cost-benefit greedy comes within 1-1/e of the best placement at any budget. Inverting the budget gives the budget-correctness frontier B*(eps), the least spend that guarantees an eps-correct consensus: closed-form on the complete graph, and a minimal oracle count k* when oracles cost the same. Whether a budget then buys a few strong oracles or many medium onese curvature of the cost-quality law: diminishing returns favour spreadsharply increasion. Measured onthe Qwen3 ladder (0.6-32B), the law is concave for math verificatio convex foremergent code tracing, so the verdict is genuinely this http URL://github.com/YehudaItkin/budgeted-oracle-placemen

In this paper, we present the first (to the best of our knowledge) demonstration of a low-power MCU-based edge device for Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR). The design leverages on a 9-core RISC-V processor, GAP8, coupled with a QVGA ultra-low-power greyscale imager. The proposed visual processing pipeline uses a multi-model inference approach based on SSDlite-MobilenetV2 for license plate detection and LPRNet for optical character recognition, reaching a 38.9% mAP score for the first task and a recognition rate of >99.13% for the latter on public datasets. On real-world data, the pipeline recognizes registration numbers when the size of LP crops is as small as 30x5 pixels. Thanks to the applied compression and optimization strategies, the multi-model inference (687 MMAC) achieves a throughput of 1.09 FPS at a power cost of 117 mW when running on GAP8. Our solution is the first MCU-class device embedding such a level of network complexity, resulting to be 73x more energy-efficient w.r.t. precedent mobile-class ALPR system featuring a Raspberry Pi3. The proposed design does not resort to any hardwired acceleration engines, thus retaining full flexibility for future algorithmic improvements.

Industrial agentic AI systems increasingly exhibit a gap between prototype capability and production deployment. In particular, adaptive agents may generate plausible outputs while remaining difficult to verify under non-determinism, confidentiality constraints, limited context, and weak observability. This paper formulates a bounded verification protocol for adaptive agentic controllers represented by finite symbolic rules, explicit diagnostic predicates, explanation logs, and held-out re-evaluation. The central research question is: when an adaptive agentic controller is represented through finite rules, explicit diagnostic predicates, explanation logs, and held-out re-evaluation, which classes of controller failure can be detected, locally repaired, or rejected without relying on unrestricted human-in-the-loop judgment? The proposed framework treats the controller as a finite revisable object. Diagnostic failures are mapped to predefined rule-level edits, including rule addition, rule deletion, and priority revision. Repaired controllers are then evaluated on held-out simulation seeds or cloned initial states. Experiments in a stylized financially constrained inventory-control benchmark show three outcomes: resource-induced failures that remain non-repairable by one rule edit, partial repairs that are rejected because they violate thresholds or guardrails, and a local one-step repair of an order-volatility failure induced by removing a smoothing rule. The contribution is methodological and provides a simulation-compatible procedure for testing whether specific controller-level failures can be made observable, explainable, locally revisable, and empirically re-tested under controlled conditions.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been successfully adopted in various fields, including wireless communications, robotics, and autonomous vehicles, owing to their outstanding adaptability and reasoning abilities. Despite their huge potential, the application of LLMs for mobility management is relatively scarce since it requires not only analyzing wireless measurements but also predicting dynamic user trajectories and making real-time handover decisions across densely deployed small base stations (SBSs). In this paper, we propose an environment-aware mobility management scheme based on large multimodal models (LMMs), which extend capabilities of LLMs to process multimodal sensing data. By leveraging LMMs, the proposed scheme extracts contextual information on the surrounding environments from RGB-D images to capture user equipment (UE) mobility patterns and identify signal reflections and blockages caused by static reflectors and dynamic obstacles. Using the extracted environmental information, the proposed scheme learns the intrinsic mapping from UE and SBS positions to channel capacity, referred to as channel capacity map (CCM), from which future channel capacities along UE trajectories are predicted. Based on the predicted channel capacities, we determine proactive handover decisions maximizing the cumulative channel capacities. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves substantial channel capacity improvements over conventional deep learning (DL)-based approaches.

Dysgraphia is a specific learning disability that is prevalent among school-age children. It affects handwriting coherence, quality, fluency, and legibility, often hindering academic achievement and early learning development. This motor coordination disorder is typically diagnosed through subjective assessments based on clinician observation, which can be timeconsuming and prone to variability. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning-based framework for objective dysgraphia detection using online handwriting data captured via digitizing tablets. The proposed framework relies on two complementary branches: the first pipeline extracts both handcrafted and embedding-based kinematic features directly from raw temporal signals, while the second leverages image-based representations of the temporal signals generated using continuous wavelet transforms (CWT) and Gramian Angular Fields (GAF). The resulting features are then fused to leverage the complementary strengths of both representations. The four representations were evaluated separately and jointly using the publicly available DiaGraMo dataset, showing that the fusion of GAF, MOMENT, and hand-crafted kinematic features outperforms each individual representation, as well as other fusion schemes. These findings highlight the potential of the complementarity of image and signal based representations for more objective dysgraphia detection.

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments is typically driven by informative frontiers, viewpoints, or trajectories, while local safety controllers avoid obstacles represented in the current map. Under finite sensing range and limited field of view, this separation can be unsafe: an exploration stack may plan optimistically through unobserved space and steer the sensor toward information gain rather than along the direction of motion, causing hidden obstacles to be detected too late for bounded-actuation avoidance. This paper presents SEAMLiS (Safe Exploration for Autonomous Multi-Robot Systems Under Limited Sensing), a modular execution-layer safety framework for decentralized multi-robot exploration. SEAMLiS preserves the upstream exploration stack, including the goal allocator and local planner, and enforces safety at the execution layer through perception-aware attitude and positional filters. A gatekeeper-based attitude filter switches between a visibility-promoting yaw policy and a velocity-tracking backup policy to preserve visibility of the critical known-free/unknown boundary with sufficient braking margin. A Control Barrier Function (CBF)-based positional filter then avoids known obstacles, newly detected obstacles, and other robots. We provide sufficient collision-avoidance conditions and validate the framework in randomized simulation, Isaac Sim, and Crazyflie hardware experiments. Results show collision-free exploration across tested single- and multi-robot settings while retaining much of the efficiency of visibility-promoting yaw control.

Industrial sound design requires audio generation systems that not only produce realistic audio, but also preserve the perceptual identity of a reference, support controllable variation, and remain efficient for practical workflows. Existing evaluations are usually tied to text-to-audio (TTA), unconditional, or task-specific settings, limiting assessment for reference-guided sound effects (SFX) variation. To address this gap, we present a production-oriented evaluation framework for structured comparison of heterogeneous audio generation and editing methods. Our framework identifies nine production requirements and explicitly accounts for differences in model capabilities, enabling comparison under a common production objective. A two-stage protocol is introduced: (1) a reference-guided audio-to-audio (ATA) variation task, in which all methods are evaluated under the same ESC-50 SFX adaptation setup, and (2) capability-specific analyses of native operations such as SFX morphing, temporal and energy alignment, inpainting, and targeted editing. This framework combines objective metrics (including FAD, ImageBind-based reference alignment, and diversity across generated variants), together with a human study of perceptual identity preservation and transient diagnosis. Our study reveals complementary strengths and trade-offs across baselines for different production needs. Among the full-generation baselines evaluated under a shared ATA setting, AudioX provides the strongest overall trade-off between reference alignment and diversity while still supporting SFX morphing. Other baselines remain most suitable for specific editing operations. Our framework establishes a structured evaluation and decision protocol for reference-guided SFX variation and provides a practical basis for designing future unified industrial audio generation pipelines. Audio demos are on the accompanying web page.

Learning-based separation assurance for small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) achieves near-zero collision rates in simulation, but assumes accurate position and velocity information from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). This assumption fails in urban environments, where multipath propagation, signal blockage, and intentional interference degrade navigation integrity. This raises a fundamental architectural question for deploying learned separation policies under GNSS degradation: should runtime safety mechanisms filter the policy's actions or its observations? This work evaluates both approaches for multi-agent sUAS separation under adversarial GNSS degradation. Both architectures first estimate a worst-case traffic state consistent with bounded observation uncertainty, then diverge: action filtering constrains policy outputs via discrete-time control barrier functions evaluated at the worst-case state, while observation filtering presents the worst-case state directly to the policy as corrected input. Experimental results show that action filtering provides negligible safety improvement, while observation filtering reduces near mid-air collisions by 90% and remains robust to the barrier function's tradeoff between separation distance and closing rate. These results suggest that, for policies with learned safety behaviors, preserving the policy's decision authority outperforms overriding its actions with hand-designed constraints.

Purpose: Fully optical receive coils can potentially allow dense receiver arrays with a large channel count, reduced channel crosstalk, and less cable clutter. The power requirements of conventional low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) are prohibitive for simultaneously driving many coils through optical means, as opto-electric power conversion efficiencies can only reach about 50%. The goal is to develop low-power LNAs (LPLNA) with substantially lower power consumption without compromising noise figure (NF) and gain. Methods: A LPLNA was designed as a two-stage cascaded amplifier using an MR-compatible E-pHEMT (Enhancement-mode Pseudomorphic High Electron Mobility Transistor) transistor. The design was implemented on a single-sided printed circuit board (PCB), and its performance was compared with a commercial LNA. A four-channel shielded loop resonator array was constructed, and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), noise covariance, and preamplifier decoupling performance were evaluated. Results: The LPLNA had a five-fold lower electrical power consumption (40 mW) than the commercial LNA and provided comparable SNR in phantom measurements. In vivo experiments further confirmed that the LPLNA operates reliably under realistic MRI conditions. Additionally, four-channel receiver array measurements demonstrated comparable SNR within 2% of the commercial LNA and lower inter-channel noise correlation with 0.26 vs 0.3 on average. Conclusion: This study demonstrates the feasibility of LPLNAs for optically-powered RF receiver coil arrays. The LPLNA could also be applied in power-constrained or remote MRI environments.

Building pixel-level correspondence between event and image data is a fundamental task for multi-sensor systems. However, existing cross-modal matching methods are largely restricted by their reliance on either matching labels or strictly aligned hardware, which limits them to unlabeled and unconstrained real-world scenarios where neither matching ground truth nor prior sensor relationships are available. To address this, we propose a novel two-stage training paradigm. First, we leverage large-scale data to perform label-agnostic distillation pretraining, upgrading optimization objectives with distribution-based and contrastive losses to learn highly generalizable representations. Second, to tackle unlabeled and unconstrained downstream data, we introduce an epipolar-guided self-distillation framework. By utilizing consistency verification to isolate robust matches and incorporating geometric confidence derived from an external epipolar prior, our model can effectively self-evolve directly on target domains without any supervision. Furthermore, we introduce a rigorous cross-modal evaluation benchmark based on TUM-VIE, featuring physically separated cameras with distinct intrinsic parameters and resolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both MVSEC and TUM-VIE pose estimation tasks. The source code and benchmark will be made publicly available at this https URL.

Face recognition is a ubiquitously used computer vision task that has a wide range of applications ranging from everyday smartphone biometrics to high-stakes security systems. Most face recognition systems rely on traditional cameras, which often suffer from limitations such as bulky form factors, high costs, and limited privacy protection. To address these limitations, lensless cameras have emerged as an alternative. Lensless cameras use thin optical encoders, enabling smaller size, lower cost, and greater design flexibility. These cameras are typically paired with reconstruction algorithms that convert raw captures into recognizable images. However, reconstructed images often contain artifacts, and the reconstruction methods struggle to generalize well to real-world conditions. Furthermore, existing face datasets do not account for the artifacts present in lensless images. To address this issue, we introduce the Lensless Face Dataset (LFD). LFD comprises 21,080 lensless raw measurements, reconstructions, and standard images of faces captured under diverse lighting, angle, and distance. Our key contributions are: (1) Real-world lensless face data: LFD focuses on capturing a diverse face dataset with varying levels of artifacts introduced under different environments; (2) In-the-wild captures: 4,976 images are captured in outdoor settings with varying intensities of natural light and different background patterns; (3) Multiple lensless devices: LFD includes face images collected from three different types of lensless cameras, each with a unique optical encoder. We use this hardware diversity to demonstrate generalization across different lensless cameras. Through comprehensive evaluations and analysis, we show that LFD effectively captures shared features and artifacts across different lensless imaging devices, making it a valuable dataset for advancing lensless face recognition.

Communication graph rigidity is a fundamental requirement in many multi robot formation control approaches. However, ensuring and maintaining a rigid communication topology becomes challenging in practice due to limited sensing ranges and dynamic operating conditions. This paper provides a method for achieving an inter robot collision free, rigid time varying communication graph, where communication links are established or broken according to limited sensing ranges, without assuming an initial rigid graph. In addition, the proposed approach guarantees the realization of a rigid graph for heterogeneous nonlinear multi robot systems. A computationally lean, distributed quadratic optimization-based controller is developed for a leader follower architecture, acquiring rigidity based on hierarchical second-order consensus among robots. Follower agents do not require global absolute positions of any agent, including their own. The proposed method is validated through both simulations and hardware experiments in a motion-capture environment, demonstrating reliable performance under the limited sensing capabilities of individual robots.

At the limit of handling, a stabilizing MPC depends on the yaw-rate reference it tracks and the stable-handling envelope it enforces, both operating-point-dependent and unknown a priori, so fixed or worst-case settings are either too conservative or unsafe. We learn this uncertainty with a conditional diffusion residual model and apply it to the controller's reference and constraints rather than its control law. Conditioned on the steering command, the model returns the residual's mean and a predictive spread: the mean re-sizes the tracked yaw reference, while the spread, propagated over the prediction horizon, tightens the stable-handling envelope through a one-sided chance back-off. Together these form the proposed diffusion-residual MPC (D-res), so caution is anticipated ahead of the tracking error rather than corrected after it by a high-gain loop. Because only two moments per command are needed, the generator is tabulated offline and the online controller adds a single table lookup to the baseline MPC, with no in-loop diffusion; it runs within the 100 Hz budget on an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier (worst-case 4.08 ms per step). Across a 7-DOF model and high-fidelity CarMaker co-simulation spanning vehicle, tire, road, and maneuver diversity, D-res reduces peak side-slip where the fixed bicycle model is least accurate and restores directional stability on low-friction maneuvers, where the fixed reference over-commands the available grip.

This paper investigates how language similarity can improve cross-lingual transfer for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in extremely low-resource settings. Warlpiri, an Australian Aboriginal language, has very limited transcribed speech data, making transfer learning essential. We propose a framework combining acoustic similarity from pre-trained speech models with linguistic similarity based on typology, phoneme inventories, grammatical, and syntactic features to rank high-resource source languages and evaluate their effectiveness for ASR transfer to Warlpiri. Experiments with Whisper show that acoustically and typologically similar languages outperform monolingual and multilingual baselines. Assamese and Hindi achieve substantial reductions in word and character error rates. Correlation analysis further indicates that acoustic similarity is the strongest predictor of fine-tuning performance, while phoneme inventory and typological similarity better explain zero-shot transfer.

Despite exposing rich intermediate representations, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are almost exclusively utilized as black-box feature extractors, where only the last layer is considered for downstream tasks. We challenge this convention by introducing the notion of recoverability: the capacity of intermediate representations to correct last-layer failures. By evaluating independent classification probes at every model depth across 16 datasets, we observe that intermediate probes correctly classify 18% to 76% of samples that the last-layer probe misclassifies. We show that these gains are not primarily driven by predictive diversity, but by a redundancy-correctness correspondence, where the internal hierarchy acts as a series of stable, redundant probes of a shared discriminative signal. While established horizontal ensemble strategies (i.e., across multiple models) can improve performance, they incur high computational cost and ignore this vertical signal within a single model. To bridge this gap, we propose VFusion, a principled vertical aggregation strategy employing a learnable mapping into a low-dimensional latent space that synthesizes features across the internal ViT hierarchy. VFusion substantially outperforms established aggregation baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, notably closing 45% of the accuracy gap between the best individual layer and a theoretical oracle performance. Our gains consistently generalize across model sizes and pre-training regimes, confirming that VFusion offers a robust and efficient alternative to horizontal ensemble methods. The code is available at this https URL.

Real-world deployment of vision models to broadly benefit society is arguably a main research objective. In optical flow, however, the difficulty to obtain the ground truth has focused research mainly on synthetic data and domain-specific benchmarks. Here, we investigate the severity of this mismatch. We study how well modern optical flow estimation models generalise to real-world video and question if accuracy on synthetic benchmark proxies actually predicts accuracy on real-world optical flow. To address this, we build a real-world evaluation benchmark and evaluate the real-world generalisability of a broad set of recent optical flow models using standard checkpoints. Our benchmark contains 8,204 frame pairs across TAP-Flow, Slow Flow, and our own dataset FlowFactor. FlowFactor is a manually annotated real-world benchmark of 1,000 HD frame pairs organised into four confounding factors: large displacements, repetitive textures, occlusions, and lighting variation. Each setting mainly varies only one factor, enabling diagnostic, confounder-specific analysis. Using FlowFactor, we reveal that performance on varying lighting and large displacements correlates most strongly with real-world accuracy, and that improvements on large-motion regimes can trade off against robustness in small-motion, stationary scenes. Our experiments show that progress on Sintel, KITTI and Spring only weakly predicts accuracy on real-world data, highlighting the need for a broad real-world optical flow benchmark. Interestingly, scaling up the amount of training data does not necessarily resolve the gap, calling for new innovative research instead of simply scaling data and compute.

As the 3D printing market continues to grow rapidly, with an estimated value exceeding $30 billion, cybersecurity risks and attacks targeting additive manufacturing systems are also increasing. These attacks aim to sabotage printed components, steal intellectual property, or even physically damage the 3D printer itself. One major cybersecurity threat in this domain is firmware level attacks, which can be introduced through supply chain compromises, malicious firmware updates, or insider threats that deploy modified firmware to manipulate printer behavior. To defend against such threats, we propose a dedicated hardware based security solution,Firewall3D, that acts as a hardware firewall for 3D printers. Firewall3D continuously monitors physical layer signals, including stepper motor currents, end stop switches, nozzle and bed temperatures and cooling fans, to verify that the printer's physical behavior matches the intended G-code execution. Our experimental results demonstrate that Firewall3D can effectively detect a wide range of firmware attacks that could compromise print integrity, damage printer components, or leak intellectual property. Upon detecting abnormal behavior, the system can immediately trigger an alarm and halt the printing process, thereby preventing further damage and risks.

Dance-to-music generation is a promising task for applications such as choreography support and automatic accompaniment, where temporal coordination between body movement and sound is essential. In particular, using human joint positions as the motion representation is attractive because they explicitly capture body dynamics while being lightweight, privacy-preserving, and easy to integrate with motion capture and pose-estimation pipelines. A central challenge in this setting, however, is the scarcity of high-quality paired dance-music data, since collecting accurately synchronized pairs is costly and often constrained by copyright and performance rights. This makes it difficult to train end-to-end models solely from paired data. To address this issue, we propose a dance-conditioned music generation framework that efficiently exploits both unpaired and paired data. Our method combines pretrained unimodal encoders for motion and music, beat-guided contrastive pretraining to align their feature spaces, and a ControlNet-style conditioning module on top of a pretrained text-to-audio diffusion model. Experiments on AIST++ demonstrate that the proposed techniques improve both dance-music alignment and audio quality, as confirmed by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Compared to a state-of-the-art method, our approach achieves superior dance alignment performance and competitive audio quality. Code is available at this https URL .

Objective. Existing quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO)-based sparse-view computed tomography (CT) reconstruction neglects photon-counting statistics and anatomical heterogeneity. We address both limitations within the QUBO this http URL. We propose a quantum compressed-sensing CT method combining penalized weighted least squares (PWLS) and guided total variation (GTV). PWLS weights projection residuals by photon-count reliability, whereas GTV uses gradients from a prior image reconstructed by the simultaneous algebraic reconstruction technique (SART) to preserve edges and suppress noise in homogeneous regions. After binary encoding, both terms form a unified QUBO model. Experiments used four 40 times 40 CT images under a 10-view fan-beam geometry with Poisson noise. Comparisons included conventional reconstruction methods, QUBO variants, gradient descent, simulated annealing, and a D-Wave hybrid quantum-classical this http URL results. PWLS-GTV achieved the best reconstruction quality across all cases. In the representative chest case, it reached a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 36.64 dB, compared with 22.48 dB for SART, the best conventional baseline. GTV consistently outperformed conventional total variation. Simulated annealing and the D-Wave hybrid solver produced similar reconstructions, whereas gradient descent was ineffective. Repeated hybrid-solver runs showed stable this http URL. The framework incorporates photon-statistical weighting and structure-guided regularization into QUBO-based CT reconstruction without changing its quadratic form, providing a proof of concept for quantum-assisted sparse-view CT reconstruction.

Underwater dead reckoning estimates vehicle position when vision is unavailable and external positioning cannot be assumed. A single set of filter parameters can work well in many situations, but fixed tuning may be poorly matched during turns, motion transitions, or periods when sensor measurements are less reliable. This paper presents the Situation-Triggered Calibrated Adaptive Robust Extended Kalman Filter for a BlueROV2. An onboard probabilistic trigger identifies the current motion situation while one error-state filter runs continuously. When the trigger is confident, the filter changes only to the corresponding pre-calibrated process- and measurement-noise matrices; the state estimate, covariance history, dynamics, and measurement models are not reset or replaced. The trigger, noise profiles, and a one-time Doppler velocity log yaw-alignment correction are calibrated offline using sparse AprilTag-supervised pool runs. A separate validation set selects the scheduling policy, which is then fixed before held-out testing. Across four held-out pool runs, the method reduces label-weighted mean per-run translation root-mean-square error from 0.488 m to 0.471 m relative to the same filter backbone with one global noise profile, and every held-out run favors the scheduled method. A paired bootstrap over 10-second segments gives a candidate-minus-baseline difference of -0.017 m with a 95% confidence interval of [-0.024, -0.008] m, while orientation error remains essentially unchanged. These results indicate that situation-aware covariance scheduling provides a modest but consistent vision-free dead-reckoning improvement without switching estimators or resetting the filter.

Multimodal sentiment analysis relies on language, visual, and acoustic cues, but utterance-level modality quality may vary due to occlusion, background noise, motion blur, or imperfect transcripts, causing conventional fusion to over-trust unreliable modalities. We propose MRUF, a reliability-aware fusion method that combines multi-granularity routing with uncertainty-aware calibration. MRUF summarizes sentiment-relevant representations, performs subspace- and modality-level routing, and supervises modality routing with leave-one-out error increases to estimate utterance-level modality importance. It further predicts modality-wise uncertainty and refines modality gates through inverse-variance reweighting, while modality-invariant contrastive alignment stabilizes the shared representation space. Experiments on CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI under aligned and unaligned settings show consistent improvements over strong baselines, and mechanism analysis verifies that modalities with higher predicted uncertainty receive lower fusion weights.

We consider the recovery of a pair of sparse vectors from a limited number of nonlinear observations of their superposition: $y_i=g(\inner{\ba_i}{\bPhi\bw^\ast+\bPsi\bz^\ast})+e_i$, $i=1,\dots,m$, with $m\ll n$, incoherent orthonormal bases $\bPhi,\bPsi$, a scalar link $g$, and noise $e_i$ that may be heavy-tailed or contaminated. We propose a regularization-based framework combining a Huberized data fidelity with generalized folded-concave penalties (SCAD, MCP), and a two-block proximal alternating algorithm with backtracking (NLD-PALM) whose whole iterate sequence provably converges to critical points under the Kurdyka--Łojasiewicz property, with local linear rates. On the statistical side we establish restricted strong convexity of the Huberized nonlinear loss through an exact sign-definite decomposition, and derive estimation error bounds of order $\sigma\sqrt{s\log(n)/m}$ that hold at \emph{every} localized stationary point, an oracle rate $\sigma\sqrt{s/m}$ free of $\log n$ and shrinkage bias under a beta-min condition, and a co-equal recovery theorem for \emph{unknown} monotone links via a linear surrogate and a clipped Plan--Vershynin decoupling. The estimator requires no knowledge of the sparsity levels, and its guarantees hold under symmetric noise with only finite variance. Experiments at $n=512$ under a frozen data-driven regularization rule show an earlier phase transition than convex $\ell_1$ demixing and greedy hard-thresholding baselines, a $35\times$ accuracy advantage over squared-loss estimation under $5\%$ gross outliers, and successful demixing of spike-plus-background signals observed through a saturating amplifier.

This paper provides two results that are useful in the study of the existence and the stability properties of almost periodic solutions for a given dynamical system. The obtained results are generalizations of recent results for periodic systems and are applied to the global entrainment problem in nonlinear time-invariant control systems. It is shown that local exponential stability for the unforced system and input-to-state stability with respect to small inputs can guarantee global entrainment to small almost periodic inputs. In this way, global entrainment is shown in Lotka-Volterra systems with a Volterra-Lyapunov stable interaction matrix. All results can be extended to the uniformly recurrent case.

A key limitation on the use of diffusion models in robotic planning is their inability to inherently enforce safety or dynamical constraints, which often results in physically infeasible or unsafe outputs. Hybrid approaches that employ model predictive control (MPC) to address this problem can be unstable, as poor trajectory initializations from the diffusion model prevent the MPC from converging to a safe and feasible solution. To overcome these challenges, we propose D-SafeMPC, which enhances the interaction between diffusion and control. Our method guides the reverse diffusion process with control barrier functions (CBFs) and control Lyapunov functions (CLFs) and employs an iterative-projection scheme where an MPC refines the trajectory at each denoising step. This steers sampling toward safe, goal-directed regions and provides reliable MPC warm starts. In simulations on a Franka manipulator across four scenarios (one static-obstacle and three dynamic-obstacle settings) and in a sim-to-real experiment on a physical Franka robot, D-SafeMPC improves safety, task success rates, and planning efficiency over state-of-the-art baselines. To facilitate reproducibility, our source code and experimental configurations are available in a repository at this https URL

Achieving optimal screw placement for orthopedic surgeries requires frequent alignment checks and multiple anatomical views under X-ray -- a process known as "fluoro-hunting" that increases radiation exposure to patients and surgical teams. This work introduces X-GuideAR, an augmented reality (AR) framework for identifying optimal X-ray views, aimed at reducing radiation exposure while ensuring accurate screw placement. To exemplify the benefits of X-GuideAR, we focus on S2 alar-iliac (S2AI) screw placement. Our system provides radiation-free guidance for view acquisition and drilling by generating synthetic X-ray previews that accelerate fluoro-hunting. Once the required anatomical views are identified using these previews, a real X-ray is acquired, and the preview of the drilling trajectory is augmented onto it, facilitating precise screw placement with minimal additional radiation. A preliminary study involving eight S2AI trajectories performed by an expert spine surgeon demonstrated a 62.3% reduction in the number of X-rays. Post-procedure evaluations showed that trajectories done with X-GuideAR supported an average safe screw diameter of 12.95 mm compared to 5.9 mm under the conventional workflow, suggesting improved bony containment and potential biomechanical benefit. X-GuideAR shows great potential to reduce radiation exposure and streamline S2AI screw placement, offering a promising direction toward safer and more efficient surgeries.

Learning temporal logic specifications from system demonstrations is essential for tasks such as formal verification and controller synthesis, especially in safety-critical domains. Existing approaches typically assume demonstrations are correct or only affected by misclassification errors. In practice, however, system traces are often uncertain or incomplete due to sensor faults, measurement errors, or data loss. We present a framework for learning minimal Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas from demonstrations with uncertainty. Our approach models uncertainty via Hamming distance to generate possible estimates around each observed trace, which are grouped with constraints requiring that at least one trace per group is consistent with the learned formula. Our problem is then reduced to an equivalent Pseudo-Boolean Optimization. We evaluate our method against state-of-the-art LTL learning approaches and show that it recovers specifications that more closely align with ground-truth formulas under uncertainty.

Generative models often represent signals as dense grids of amplitudes, blurring sharp transients that are crucial for the correctness of physical signals. We introduce Singularity Space, a generative framework that represents signals through complex-plane singularities, rooted in the classical pole-residue representation of meromorphic functions. We learn a latent space of physically constrained, per-signal singularity configurations to solve an inverse problem from degraded or partial observations. The framework has three key properties: interpretability, in which each generated singularity configuration corresponds to a set of physical parameters; structural stability, which mitigates Gibbs artifacts at discontinuities; and resolution-free output reconstruction on arbitrary grids without retraining or interpolation. Our framework employs a transformer-based diffusion model that directly predicts samples at complex-plane singularity coordinates, subject to geometric constraints during sampling. As a controlled test case for sharp-feature recovery, we evaluate our framework on 1D Burgers shocks, where each shock is represented by 32 predicted singularities (an $8\times$ reduction versus a 1024-point grid signal). Our framework preserves signal structure ($\text{TV ratio} \approx 1$) under unseen test-time observation noise, achieves a $4.2\times$ lower reconstruction error in zero-shot sub-resolution generalization than a grid-based baseline, and recovers physical parameters to $10^{-4}$ absolute error in-distribution. These results suggest that singularity-based representations may provide a practical foundation for other transient-dominated signals such as speech and biomedical signals, with potential extension to higher-dimensional domains.

We address ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) recognition in the ABAW 2026 BAH Challenge: given a short interview video, predict whether the person shows signs of A/H. Our system combines affect-specialised text, audio, and visual representations with a small set of readable linguistic hesitation cues, fused by a reliability gate we call Affective Marker Fusion (AMF), and finished with a simple AP-weighted ensemble at a fixed decision threshold. We also introduce \emph{ASR-erased time}: speech recognisers delete fillers and hesitation pauses from the transcript, but the chunk timestamps keep the time those events took, and sixteen features built from these gaps form the strongest and most independent non-verbal channel we measured (AP $0.718$, correlation $0.11$--$0.36$ with all other members). Across controlled experiments we find three things: cross-modal conflict design does not reliably help on BAH; language is by far the strongest channel while affect-specialised audio is a useful second; and calibration matters more than architecture. Fitting ensemble weights and a threshold on the small validation split overfits: it scores $0.741$ macro-F1 on validation but only $0.690$ on the untouched test set. AP-weighting at a fixed threshold instead reaches $\mathbf{0.731}$ on test.

Large-scale pretrained ASR models such as Whisper exhibit strong multilingual capabilities. However, fine-tuning on low-resource languages often causes catastrophic forgetting. Although continual learning mitigates this issue, existing methods struggle to regulate cross-task interference in multilingual settings, where dominant languages bias optimization. We propose Unified Gradient Projection (UGP), which constrains parameter updates using reference gradients from language-balanced replay in a unified projection space. By equalizing per-language contributions in the projection, UGP reduces dominant-language bias and improves cross-lingual stability. We further show that combining gradient-level projection with data-level replay yields complementary gains in stability and plasticity. Across diverse low-resource language groups and model scales, UGP enables effective adaptation while substantially mitigating forgetting. On Whisper-large-v3, it achieves near-zero average forgetting.

Cloud gaming streams cloud-rendered frames under strict motion-to-photon latency, yet its at-scale viability is increasingly constrained by bandwidth cost: in our study of the T cloud gaming platform, bandwidth accounts for 30-60% of total operating expense. This high bandwidth consumption stems from a fidelity-first objective of making the stream perceptually indistinguishable from local gameplay. It drives production systems toward best-effort bitrate allocation that pushes the encoder to the highest rate allowed by congestion control. However, the bitrate-perception relationship saturates: beyond a frame-dependent perceptually lossless threshold, additional bits yield negligible perceptual improvement, creating systematic redundant quality that wastes bandwidth. We present SAIL, a production quality-aware rate control system with the goal of achieving perceptually lossless quality while avoiding unnecessary bandwidth waste. SAIL adopts a post-encoding architecture to enable millisecond-scale feedback at near-zero overhead. It comprises three key designs: (i) an encoder-driven quality assessment model that leverages zero-cost encoder outputs for real-time quality estimation; (ii) a hybrid rate control mechanism that balances steady-state adaptation with dynamic spike absorption; and (iii) a network-aware strategy that coordinates with congestion control to prevent capacity underestimation. SAIL has been fully deployed on the T cloud gaming platform and reduces bandwidth consumption by 44.27% and end-to-end latency by 8.37% without degrading perceived quality, serving tens of millions of users and accumulating billions of hours of total gameplay.

This paper addresses the optimal control of epidemic dynamics under conflicting socio-economic objectives. We propose an economic Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework, applied to an extended SEIR-V (Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered-Vaccinated) compartmental model to govern the spread of an infectious disease while minimizing economic disruption. The control problem is formulated as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem, in which the controller dynamically adjusts social interaction levels (transmission rate beta) and vaccination efforts to minimize a composite cost function that penalizes fatalities, healthcare capacity violations, and economic losses. We conduct a rigorous sensitivity analysis of the prediction horizon N, demonstrating that the closed loop is robust to the horizon choice and that N = 35 days minimizes the realized cost. Furthermore, both the closed-loop solution and an open-loop turnpike analysis across diverse initial conditions reveal that the celebrated "Hammer and Dance" mitigation strategy emerges naturally as the mathematical optimum: the optimal trajectories anchor to a unique suppression turnpike (maximum lockdown) to drive hospitalizations toward the disease-free equilibrium before progressively reopening the economy. Through a turnpike-based argument we establish practical asymptotic stability of the optimal operating point, providing a mathematically grounded decision-support tool for pandemic policy.

In this work, we consider the identification and control of nonlinear systems with finite action spaces. The unknown dynamics are estimated from finite samples with Koopman operator regression in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, yielding a linear switching predictive model, the switches governed by the value of the control variable. In order to perform control in closed-loop, the learned dynamics are employed in an infinite-horizon optimal control problem with time-varying stage cost, which is solved by means of model predictive control. In a theoretical analysis, we derive learning rates for the Koopman dynamics approximation. We further quantify, under suitable assumptions, the sub-optimality of the model predictive control strategy, both in the case of exact Koopman dynamics, and in the case of learned ones. Numerical simulations on the Duffing oscillator complement our theoretical findings.

Deep learning for EEG-based seizure detection faces critical challenges: severe annotation scarcity and extreme class imbalance, where ictal events comprise less than 10\% of clinical recordings. We present DiffEEG, a 9.6M-parameter self-supervised foundation model that addresses both limitations through denoising diffusion pre-training and reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning. Pre-trained on 1.3M unlabeled segments from the Temple University Hospital Seizure Corpus (TUHSZ), DiffEEG learns generic neural representations via a 1D U-Net with multi-head self-attention. For downstream adaptation, a reinforced decision layer employs policy gradient optimization to directly maximize F1-score, prioritizing sensitivity to rare seizure events over overall accuracy. Under strict patient-wise evaluation (279 patients, Leave-One-Fold-Out), DiffEEG achieves 61\% accuracy and 59\% F1 for 4-class seizure subtyping, and 81\% accuracy with 85\% weighted F1 for binary detection, maintaining clinically viable seizure recall (59\%) despite extreme imbalance (6.7\% prevalence). Segment-level evaluation establishes an upper bound of 97.6\% accuracy, confirming strong architectural capacity. DiffEEG demonstrates that diffusion-based pre-training combined with metric-aware reinforcement learning enables clinically deployable seizure monitoring with minimal labeled data requirements.

Due to the nonconvex binary constraints of unit commitment (UC), no uniform linear pricing scheme supports the optimal dispatch. Convex hull pricing (CHP) and copositive duality pricing (CDP) both address this problem. CHP derives the price from the subgradient of the value function of the convex hull relaxation of UC. CDP refers to several different pricing mechanisms that can be constructed from the dual multipliers of the completely positive programming reformulation. In this work, we define a centralized convex hull price over the joint feasible set of UC and prove that, under non-degeneracy, it coincides with the marginal copositive duality price. Numerical experiments on the Scarf example validate this equivalence and quantify the pricing gap introduced by the semidefinite restriction.

This paper introduces numerical optimizations for maximizing throughput on GPU when solving large batches (10,000 to over 100,000) of sequential quadratic programming (SQP) iterations, where all problems have the same structure. The optimizations are implemented in a toolbox WarpMPC for model-predictive control (MPC) in JAX and Warp. Based on the insight that all MPC problem instances in a batch share the same sparsity in time, cost, and constraints, we propose unrolling sparse linear factorizations and solves, which dominate alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) solver runtime. We avoid memory access bottlenecks and wasting computations via optimized memory layout, padding-reducing segmentation of the unrolled factorization, and dependency level scheduled backsolves, additionally accelerating sensitivity computation. We achieve throughputs of 8,000 to 250,000 SQP iterations per second on nonlinear cartpole, quadrotor, and humanoid robot benchmarks, outperforming baselines by 3$\times$ to 25$\times$. We illustrate practical usefulness by synthesizing a dataset and training a neural network approximation of an MPC in under 4 minutes that stabilizes a nano quadrotor in hardware experiments.

State-of-the-art speech enhancement models benefit from large-scale labeled datasets, whereas singing voice separation models suffer from limited available training data. To address this limitation, we formulate singing voice separation as domain adaptation from speech enhancement to singing voice separation. We investigate two fine-tuning strategies: full fine-tuning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on a discriminative and a generative model. Models with either adaptation strategy outperform the same architectures trained from scratch by 0.29-1.8 dB in Signal-to-Distortion-Ratio. Full fine-tuning yields the highest singing voice separation performance, but catastrophic forgetting degrades speech enhancement performance. LoRA fine-tuning achieves competitive singing voice separation performance while preserving the original speech enhancement capability with only 6-12% additional parameters compared to the base speech enhancement model. Furthermore, the generative model shows improved generalization to an unseen test set. The results demonstrate that adapting pretrained speech enhancement models is an effective strategy for training singing voice separation models in data-scarce scenarios.

This paper derives an analytical differential flatness transform for a tailsitter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) under coordinated flight conditions using a simplified aerodynamic model. The proposed framework is formulated exclusively using rotation matrices, avoiding the ambiguities inherent to Euler angle representations. The method extends the applicability of an existing state-of-the-art differential flatness-based controller to flight regimes involving a significant vertical velocity component, where the previous approach becomes inapplicable. The proposed framework is validated experimentally with trajectories that highlight its advantages in these regimes.

Indoor robotics research increasingly relies on micro-UAVs whose airframe, electronics, and control software are fully open to modification. Off-the-shelf platforms rarely expose the low-level access required for such modifications, while building a custom alternative typically requires substantial engineering effort before flight testing can begin, leaving many laboratories to work within constraints that limit the scope of their research. We present MIRA (Modular Indoor Research Architecture), a low-cost, open-source micro-UAV for indoor research built around a replicable 3D-printed PLA airframe and a containerized low-level software package managing the companion-to-autopilot communication bridge via Micro XRCE-DDS. Designed as a white-box architecture, core subsystems are individually replaceable without firmware refactoring, supporting local fabrication and component substitution from existing lab inventory. We characterize MIRA through manual flight in position-control mode within an optical motion-capture volume, where the communication pipeline sustains a median companion-to-autopilot latency of 0.02 ms and power spectral density analysis confirms the structural vibration energy stays concentrated in a narrow 90 to 110 Hz band, isolated from the sub-20 Hz control bandwidth and within the autopilot safety thresholds.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a critical component of modern robotic systems because it is one of the most natural and intuitive ways for humans to interact with robots. A commonly used method is to directly use API services online. But is that all we can do? This article provides an overview of how ASR technologies are integrated into various intelligent robots and machines. We discuss the evolution of speech recognition from established approaches to state-of-the-art deep learning models, such as OpenAI's Whisper. We also list large-scale datasets and open source toolkits that have been widely used in both industry and academia. We structure the survey around ASR model families, deployment strategies in robotics (especially ROS-based, cloud-based, and hybrid solutions), and several real-world robotic platforms. Finally, we outline the challenges of deploying robust speech recognition in robots and discuss future directions, including multimodal interaction in diverse and dynamic environments. This paper can help social robotics researchers better navigate the emerging domain of language-based natural human-robot interaction.

This article presents a novel, numerically viable algorithm for solving sparse robust optimal control problems in continuous time. We consider a constrained linear noisy system governed by an ordinary differential equation (ODE), with an $L^1$-type objective function in line with the sparse optimal control literature. The resulting optimal control problem is shown to admit a semi-infinite programming (SIP) formulation. Building upon this insight, we develop a new framework that enables the computation of exact solutions -- to our knowledge, the first such achievement in the context of sparse optimal control. We demonstrate that a finite and computationally viable convex optimization problem can be solved to recover, in a lossless manner, both the optimal value and the corresponding optimizers of the original SIP, while also guaranteeing satisfaction of uncountably many constraints. We also show that the parameter-dependent noisy systems and the minimum attention problem fall into our framework and can be solved efficiently via our algorithm. The efficacy of our algorithm is illustrated through a benchmark numerical example.

This article is devoted to providing a review of mathematical formulations in which Polynomial Chaos Theory (PCT) has been incorporated into stochastic model predictive control (SMPC). In the past decade, PCT has been shown to provide a computationally tractable way to perform complete and accurate uncertainty propagation through (smooth) nonlinear dynamic systems. As such, it represents a very useful computational tool for accelerating the computations needed in SMPC with time invariant uncertainties. It turns out that it can also be used to reduce complexity of chance constraints, which are an important component of SMPC. In this paper, we provide an overview of PCT and discuss how it can be applied in such time invariant settings.

Ride-hailing platforms frequently face spatiotemporal supply-demand imbalances caused by uneven passenger demand and decentralized driver decision-making. Existing vehicle rebalancing methods typically assume drivers always follow repositioning recommendations or model adherence using static probabilities. In practice, adherence evolves through repeated interactions with the platform. We propose the Adherence-Aware Vehicle Rebalancing (AAVR) model, which generates simultaneous fleet-wide repositioning recommendations while explicitly accounting for driver preferences and dynamically evolving adherence. The resulting optimization problem is computationally intractable, so we derive a tractable upper-bound reformulation that enables real-time recommendation generation for large-scale systems. Simulations on the NYC taxi dataset under dynamic adherence updates show that AAVR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving served demand by 26.72%, reducing passenger waiting time by 26.45%, increasing platform and driver profits by 25.90% and 28.75%, respectively, and improving fleet adherence by 30.06%. These results demonstrate that modeling evolving driver adherence improves both operational performance and long-term adherence to platform recommendations.

This paper proposes a stochastic model predictive control method for linear systems affected by additive Gaussian disturbances that optimizes over disturbance feedback matrices online. Closed-loop satisfaction of probabilistic constraints and recursive feasibility of the underlying convex optimization problem is guaranteed. Optimization over feedback policies online increases performance and reduces conservatism compared to fixed-feedback approaches. The central mechanism is a finitely determined maximal admissible set for probabilistic constraints, together with the reconditioning of the predicted probabilistic constraints on the current knowledge at every time step. The proposed method's applicability is demonstrated on a building temperature control example.

This paper presents an optimization framework to model multi-agent racing dynamics. By incorporating physically accurate interaction models and accounting for the optimal responses of competing agents, our approach reveals strategic behaviors typical of motorsport. Aerodynamic wake effects, trajectory optimization, and energy management are captured and evaluated on a representative case study, based on a Formula 1 scenario. We describe the minimum lap time problem with two agents as either a Nash or a Stackelberg game, and by employing the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions during the problem formulation, we recover the structure of a nonlinear program. In addition, we introduce an algorithm to refine local Stackelberg solutions, using the Nash costs as upper bounds. The resulting strategies are analyzed through case studies. We examine the impact of slipstreaming on trajectory selection in corners, straights, and high-speed sections, while also identifying optimal overtaking locations based on energy allocation strategies. Exploiting the structural similarities of the game formulations, we are able to compare symmetric and hierarchical strategies to analyze competitive racing dynamics. The proposed methodology closes the gap between theoretical game theory and practical applications, with relevance in multi-agent systems with coupled nonlinear dynamics.

Holographic multiple-input multiple-output (HMIMO) can improve spectral efficiency (SE) with low hardware cost, but conventional alternating optimization (AO) methods for jointly optimizing digital and holographic beamformers are computationally expensive. Learning-based beamforming offers a low-complexity alternative, and graph neural networks (GNNs) are particularly attractive because they can exploit permutation equivariance (PE). The optimal HMIMO beamforming policy exhibits PE properties across multiple dimensions. Existing methods either use high-dimensional GNNs, increasing model size and training complexity, or exploit only partial PE properties, leading to performance degradation. To address this issue, we reformulate the problem by learning an equivalent beamformer that removes the RF-chain dimension from the network output while preserving the PE property of the original problem. The reformulation introduces a nontrivial column-space constraint because the equivalent beamformer must be representable by the phase-pattern matrix. We then develop a cascaded architecture consisting of a gradient-based graph neural network (GGNN) and two projection modules. The GGNN jointly learns the holographic and equivalent beamformers using update equations motivated by their coupled gradient structures, while the projection modules recover the digital beamformer and enforce the column-space and transmit-power constraints. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves higher SE with lower inference latency than the AO baseline and exhibits better generalization than existing learning-based baselines.

Electric power grids are engineered energy systems whose forward electrical responses embody high-dimensional and memory-bearing transformations of input signals. In this work, we reveal that these transformations-inherent in electric circuit elements, power flows and network topologies-can be conveniently harnessed for computation without modifying physical grid architectures. By encoding structured input data into the operational setpoints of power electronic converters inside grids, we demonstrate how forward grid dynamics are interpreted into physical representations comprising system variables by showcasing through an affine transformation example implemented on a direct-current (DC) grid, which justifies the capability of grids performing information processing tasks concurrently alongside normal power flows. Our work not only underscores the computation capability intrinsic to grid physics, but also opens a new perspective on how energy networks can function as sustainable computational substrate. This positions them as flexible assets where several computing tasks from data centers can be sustainably outsourced.

Conventional speech enhancement (SE) aims to improve speech perception and intelligibility by suppressing noise without requiring enrollment speech as reference, whereas personalized SE (PSE) addresses the cocktail party problem by extracting a target speaker's speech using enrollment speech. While these two tasks tackle different yet complementary challenges in speech signal processing, they often share similar model architectures, with PSE incorporating an additional branch to process enrollment speech. This suggests developing a unified model capable of efficiently handling both SE and PSE tasks, thereby simplifying deployment while maintaining high performance. However, PSE performance is sensitive to variations in enrollment speech, like emotional tone, which limits robustness in real-world applications. To address these challenges, we propose two novel models, USEF-PNet and DSEF-PNet, both extending our previous SEF-PNet framework. USEF-PNet introduces a unified architecture for processing enrollment speech, integrating SE and PSE into a single framework to enhance performance and streamline deployment. Meanwhile, DSEF-PNet incorporates an unsupervised speech disentanglement approach by pairing a mixture speech with two different enrollment utterances and enforcing consistency in the extracted target speech. This strategy effectively isolates high-quality speaker identity information from enrollment speech, reducing interference from factors such as emotion and content, thereby improving PSE robustness. Additionally, we explore a long-short enrollment pairing (LSEP) strategy to examine the impact of enrollment speech duration during both training and evaluation. Extensive experiments on the Libri2Mix and VoiceBank DEMAND demonstrate that our proposed USEF-PNet, DSEF-PNet all achieve substantial performance improvements, with random enrollment duration performing slightly better.

Medical imaging plays a vital role in clinical diagnosis, yet AI-driven imaging methods remain challenged by patient variability, image artifacts, and limited robustness across acquisition conditions. Although deep learning has advanced medical image analysis, 3D image translation remains hindered by limited training data and variability arising from scanner differences, imaging protocols, and patient motion. Conventional data augmentation typically relies on a single transformation pipeline, overlooking augmentation-specific characteristics and limiting representation learning. To address these challenges, we propose Multi-Encoder Augmentation-Aware Learning (MEAL), which processes multiple augmentation variants through dedicated encoder pathways. Three feature integration strategies are investigated: encoder concatenation (MEAL-CC), fusion layer (MEAL-FL), and an adaptive controller block (MEAL-BD). By dynamically weighting augmentation-specific features before decoding, MEAL-BD preserves complementary representations and improves robustness to clinically relevant variability. We evaluate MEAL using CT-to-T1-weighted MRI translation, a clinically relevant task when MRI is unavailable, contraindicated, or delayed. Across predefined and unseen test datasets, MEAL-BD consistently outperformed competing approaches under both geometric perturbations and standard imaging conditions, achieving higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM). By prioritizing structural fidelity over perceptual realism, MEAL supports clinical interpretation and downstream image analysis rather than replacing diagnostic MRI, demonstrating that augmentation-aware representation learning improves the robustness and clinical applicability of medical image translation.

With the large-scale integration of electric vehicles (EVs) in the distribution grid, the unpredictable nature of EV charging introduces considerable uncertainties to the grid's real-time operations. This can exacerbate load fluctuations, compromise power quality, and pose risks to the grid's stability and security. However, due to their dual role as controllable loads and energy storage devices, EVs have the potential to mitigate these fluctuations, balance the variability of renewable energy sources, and provide ancillary services that support grid stability. By leveraging the bidirectional flow of information and energy in smart grids, the adverse effects of EV charging can be minimized and even converted into beneficial outcomes through effective real-time management strategies. This paper explores the negative impacts of EV charging on the distribution system's real-time operations and outlines methods to transform these challenges into positive contributions. Additionally, it provides an in-depth analysis of the real-time management system for EV charging, focusing on state estimation and management strategies.

Monitoring respiration parameters such as respiratory rate could be beneficial to understand the impact of training on equine health and performance and ultimately improve equine welfare. In this work, we compare deep learning-based methods to an adapted signal processing method to automatically detect cyclic respiratory events and extract the dynamic respiratory rate from microphone recordings during high intensity exercise in Standardbred trotters. Our deep learning models are able to detect exhalation sounds (median F1 score of 0.94) in noisy microphone signals and show promising results on unlabelled signals at lower exercising intensity, where the exhalation sounds are less recognisable. Temporal convolutional networks were better at detecting exhalation events and estimating dynamic respiratory rates (median F1: 0.94, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) $\pm$ Confidence Intervals (CI): 1.44$\pm$1.04 bpm, Limits Of Agreements (LOA): 0.63$\pm$7.06 bpm) than long short-term memory networks (median F1: 0.90, MAE$\pm$CI: 3.11$\pm$1.58 bpm) and signal processing methods (MAE$\pm$CI: 2.36$\pm$1.11 bpm). This work is the first to automatically detect equine respiratory sounds and automatically compute dynamic respiratory rates in exercising horses. In the future, our models will be validated on lower exercising intensity sounds and different microphone placements will be evaluated in order to find the best combination for regular monitoring.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) technology has emerged as a key enabler for future wireless communications. However, its potential is constrained by the difficulty of acquiring accurate user-to-RIS channel state information (CSI), due to the cascaded channel structure and the high pilot overhead of non-parametric methods. Unlike a passive RIS, where the reflected signal suffers from multiplicative path loss, an active RIS amplifies the signal, improving its practicality in real deployments. In this letter, we propose a parametric channel estimation method tailored for active RISs. The proposed approach integrates an active RIS model with an adaptive Maximum Likelihood Estimator (MLE) to recover the main channel parameters using a minimal number of pilots. To further enhance performance, an adaptive active RIS configuration strategy is employed, which refines the beam direction based on an initial user location estimate. Moreover, an orthogonal angle-pair codebook is used instead of the conventional Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) codebook, significantly reducing the codebook size and ensuring reliable operation for both far-field and near-field users. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves near-optimal performance with very few pilots compared to non-parametric approaches. Its performance is also benchmarked against that of a traditional passive RIS under the same total power budget to ensure fairness. Results show that active RIS yields higher spectral efficiency (SE) by eliminating the multiplicative fading inherent in passive RISs and allocating more resources to data transmission

Medical image segmentation using deep learning (DL) has enabled the development of automated analysis pipelines for large-scale population studies. However, state-of-the-art DL methods are prone to hallucinations, which can result in anatomically implausible segmentations. With manual correction impractical at scale, automated quality control (QC) techniques have to address the challenge. While promising, existing QC methods are organ-specific, limiting their generalizability and usability beyond their original intended task. To overcome this limitation, we propose no-new Quality Control (nnQC), a robust QC framework based on a diffusion-generative paradigm that self-adapts to any input organ dataset. Central to nnQC is a novel Team of Experts (ToE) architecture, where two specialized experts independently encode 3D spatial awareness, represented by the relative spatial position of an axial slice, and anatomical information derived from visual features from the original image. A weighted conditional module dynamically combines the pair of independent embeddings, or opinions to condition the sampling mechanism within a diffusion process, enabling the generation of a spatially aware pseudo-ground truth for predicting QC scores. Within its framework, nnQC integrates fingerprint adaptation to ensure adaptability across organs, datasets, and imaging modalities. We evaluated nnQC on seven organs using twelve publicly available datasets. Our results demonstrate that nnQC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all experiments, including cases where segmentation masks are highly degraded or completely missing, confirming its versatility and effectiveness across different organs.

Emerging deep-learning-based lens library pre-training (LensLib-PT) pipeline offers a new avenue for blind lens aberration correction by training a universal neural network, demonstrating strong capability in handling diverse unknown optical degradations. This work proposes FoundCAC, a universal foundational framework that resolves two challenges hindering the generalization of existing pipelines: the difficulty of scaling training data and the absence of prior guidance characterizing optical degradation. To improve data scalability, we expand the design specifications to increase degradation diversity and construct AODLibpro, a large-scale lens library using stratified sampling over spatial-variation patterns and degradation severity. In terms of model design, to leverage Point Spread Functions (PSFs) as guidance while maintaining the blind paradigm, we propose a multi-stage vector-quantized representation learning scheme. This paradigm is specifically designed to construct a Latent PSF Representation (LPR), explicitly encoding complex continuous PSFs into a discrete degradation prior to regularize the highly ill-posed restoration process. Through a simple yet effective codebook-freezing strategy, our framework leverages the discrete prior to elevate full-shot restoration performance and unlock highly efficient few-shot adaptation for unseen lenses. Experiments on synthetic LensLib, real-design simulations, and real-captured lenses show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance under complementary evaluation protocols, while enabling highly efficient few-shot adaptation for specific lenses. The source code and datasets will be made publicly available at this https URL.

We address the problem of optimal evasion in a planar endgame engagement, where a target with bounded lateral acceleration seeks to avoid interception by a missile guided by a linear feedback law. Contrary to existing approaches, that assume perfect information or use heuristic maneuver models in stochastic settings, we formulate the problem in an inherently stochastic framework involving imperfect information and bounded controls. Complying with the generalized separation theorem, the control law factors in the posterior distribution of the state. We extend the well-known optimality of bang-bang evasion maneuvers in deterministic settings to the realm of realistic, stochastic evasion scenarios. First, we prove that an optimal evasion strategy always exists, and that the set of optimal solutions includes at least one bang-bang policy, rendering the resulting optimal control problem finite-dimensional. Second, leveraging this structure, we propose the closed-loop terminal-set-based evasion (TSE) strategy, and demonstrate its effectiveness in simulation against a proportional navigation pursuer. Monte Carlo simulations show that the TSE strategy outperforms traditional stochastic evasion strategies based on random telegraph, Singer, and weaving models.

The transition from 5G to 6G requires frequency-dependent, physically consistent radio channel models across the upper-FR1/FR3 transition region, particularly in the under-explored $4$--$8$~GHz region targeted in the current WRC-$27$ studies, where outdoor urban channel measurements and characterizations remain scarce. This paper presents a $4.85$~GHz measurement-anchored study of urban channels and a literature-referenced cross-band analysis. Double-directional measurements were conducted at $4.85$~GHz in urban macrocell (UMa) and urban microcell (UMi) routes in Yokohama, Japan, from which path loss, delay spread (DS), azimuth spread of arrival/departure (ASA/ASD), $K$-factor, and route-dependent spatial-consistency statistics were extracted. To align these results in a broader cross-band context, the measured $4.85$~GHz large-scale parameter (LSP) means were combined with scenario-matched literature anchors to derive log-log trends for DS, ASA, and ASD over an approximately $4$--$28$~GHz range around the $7.125$~GHz upper-FR1/FR3 cross-band boundary. The resulting trends were compared with 3GPP UMa/UMi reference parameterizations over the same interval, and the sensitivity of the UMi DS fit was examined via leave-one-out analysis. Because the cross-band analysis still relies on a single in-house measurement band alongside heterogeneous anchors from different campaigns, it is presented as measurement-informed and indicative rather than as a definitive multi-band model. The paper therefore contributes both a detailed, parameterized $4.85$~GHz urban measurement reference and a bounded literature-referenced view of channel behavior near the upper-FR1/FR3 transition.

Current speech-language models (SLMs) typically use a cascade of speech encoder and large language model, treating speech understanding as a single black box. They analyze the content of speech well but reason weakly about other aspects, especially under sparse supervision. Thus, we argue for explicit reasoning over speech states and actions with modular and transparent decisions. Inspired by cognitive science we adopt a modular perspective and a world model view in which the system learns forward dynamics over latent states. We factorize speech understanding into four modules that communicate through a causal graph, establishing a cognitive state search space. Guided by posterior traces from this space, an instruction-tuned language model produces a concise causal analysis and a user-facing response, enabling counterfactual interventions and interpretability under partial supervision. We present a graph-based modular speech model for explicit reasoning, highlighting a path toward more transparent and controllable speech understanding.

Motivated by single-particle cryo-electron microscopy, multi-reference alignment (MRA) models the task of recovering an unknown signal from multiple noisy observations corrupted by random rotations. The standard approach for computing the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm; however, it often becomes computationally prohibitive, particularly in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) settings. We introduce a fast approximate MLE for MRA over the special orthogonal groups $\mathrm{SO}(2)$ and $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ in the low-SNR regime. A low-SNR Taylor expansion of the likelihood reveals a closed-form, non-iterative approximate MLE. We show that this approach yields a consistent estimator in the low-SNR limit and requires substantially lower computational complexity than both EM and invariant-based alternatives. Numerical experiments generated from molecular volumes show that the proposed method provides a favorable accuracy-runtime trade-off, especially in challenging low-SNR regimes, and can serve as an effective initialization for EM.

We present TagSpeech, a unified LLM-based framework that utilizes Temporal Anchor Grounding for joint multi-speaker ASR and diarization. The framework is built on two key designs: (1) decoupled semantic and speaker streams fine-tuned via Serialized Output Training (SOT) to learn turn-taking dynamics; and (2) an interleaved time anchor mechanism that not only supports fine-grained timestamp prediction but also acts as a synchronization signal between semantic understanding and speaker tracking. Compared to previous works that primarily focus on speaker-attributed ASR or implicit diarization, TagSpeech addresses the challenge of fine-grained speaker-content alignment and explicitly models "who spoke what and when" in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on AMI and AliMeeting benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves consistent improvements in Diarization Error Rate (DER) over strong end-to-end baselines, including Qwen-Omni and Gemini, particularly in handling complex speech overlaps. Moreover, TagSpeech employs a parameter-efficient training paradigm in which the LLM backbone is frozen and only lightweight projectors are trained, resulting in strong performance with low computational cost.

Particle-based communication using diffusion and advection has emerged as an alternative signaling paradigm recently. While most existing studies assume constant flow conditions, real macro-scale environments such as atmospheric winds exhibit time-varying behavior. In this work, airborne particle communication under time-varying advection is modeled as a linear time-varying (LTV) channel, and a closed-form, time-dependent channel impulse response is derived using the method of moving frames. Based on this formulation, the channel is characterized through its power delay profile, leading to the definition of channel dispersion time as a physically meaningful measure of channel memory and a guideline for symbol duration selection. System-level simulations under directed, time-varying wind conditions show that waveform design is critical for performance, enabling multi-symbol modulation using a single particle type when dispersion is sufficiently controlled. To quantify waveform distortion and guide the design of orthogonal signaling waveforms, the Orthogonality Loss Ratio (OLR) is introduced as a structural metric. The results demonstrate that time-varying diffusion-advection channels can be systematically modeled and engineered using communication-theoretic tools, providing a realistic foundation for particle-based communication in complex flow environments.

To develop a deep-learning method for achieving fast high-resolution MR elastography from highly undersampled data without the need of high-quality training dataset. We first framed the deep neural network representation as a nonlinear extension of the linear subspace model, then used it to represent and reconstruct MRE image repetitions from undersampled k-space data. The network weights were learned using a multi-level k-space consistent loss. To further enhance reconstruction quality, phase-contrast specific magnitude and phase priors were incorporated, including the similarity of anatomical structures and smoothness of wave-induced harmonic displacement. Experiments were conducted using both 3D gradient-echo spiral and multi-slice spin-echo spiral MRE datasets. Compared to the conventional linear subspace-based approaches, the nonlinear network representation method was able to produce superior image reconstruction with suppressed noise and artifacts from a single in-plane spiral arm per MRE repetition (e.g., 2mm isotropic resolution in 1 min with a total R=10), yielding comparable stiffness estimation to the fully sampled data. This work demonstrated the feasibility of using deep network representations to model and reconstruct MRE images from highly-undersampled data, a nonlinear extension of the subspace-based approaches.

Future sixth-generation (6G) networks are expected to support low-altitude wireless networks (LAWNs), where unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and aerial robots operate in highly dynamic three-dimensional environments under stringent latency, reliability, and autonomy requirements. In such scenarios, autonomous task execution at the network edge demands holistic coordination among sensing, communication, computing, and control (SC3) processes. Agentic Artificially Intelligent Radio Access Networks (Agentic AI-RAN) offer a promising paradigm by enabling the edge network to function as an autonomous decision-making entity for low-altitude agents with limited onboard resources. In this article, we propose a task-oriented Agentic AI-RAN architecture that enables SC3 task execution within a single edge node. The proposed architecture addresses the challenge of coordinating heterogeneous workloads in resource-constrained edge environments. To validate this framework, we prototype a representative low-altitude UAV system on a general-purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) platform and evaluate it through an autonomous drone-navigation case study. The current prototype instantiates the platform-agnostic design through Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) partitioning and containerized deployment, providing physical resource isolation and coordinated execution between real-time communication and multimodal inference. Experimental results demonstrate low closed-loop latency, robust bidirectional communication, and stable performance under dynamic runtime conditions, highlighting the feasibility of the proposed framework for mission-critical low-altitude wireless networks in 6G.

Delay-coordinates dynamic mode decomposition (DC-DMD) is widely used to extract coherent spatiotemporal modes from high-dimensional time series. A central challenge is distinguishing dynamically meaningful modes from spurious modes induced by noise and order overestimation. We frame this as a mode-selection scoring problem: each mode receives a score that ranks it as true or spurious; any hard selection (threshold or clustering) is a downstream choice. We show that mode selection in DC-DMD is fundamentally a problem of subspace geometry. True modes are characterized by concentration within a low-dimensional signal subspace, whereas spurious modes tend to retain non-negligible components outside any moderate overestimate of that subspace. This geometric distinction defines true and spurious modes and motivates fully data-driven robust scoring criteria. The framework yields two complementary scores. The first uses a data-driven proxy of the signal subspace to compute a residual. The second comes from a new operator-theoretic analysis of delay embedding: using a block-companion formulation, we show that all modes exhibit a Kronecker-Vandermonde (KV) structure, with true modes distinguished by the degree of conformity to it. This deviation is governed by the geometric residual. Our analysis further explains the empirical behavior of magnitude- and norm-based heuristics and clarifies when and why they fail under delay coordinates. Numerical experiments, evaluated by precision-recall AUC of true-vs-spurious ranking, show that the proposed scores outperform the tested baselines across most of the small-spatial-dimension regime.

This paper studies the optimization of beamforming functions for multiuser multi-continuous aperture array (CAPA) systems, where both the base station and the users are equipped with CAPAs. We first derive a closed-form expression for the achievable sum rate, and then develop a functional weighted minimum mean-squared error (WMMSE) algorithm, which transforms the functional optimization problem into an equivalent parameter optimization problem by employing orthonormal basis expansion. Based on the functional WMMSE algorithm, we further propose BeamINR, an implicit neural representation (INR) method for learning continuous beamforming functions. BeamINR is designed as a graph neural network to exploit the permutation equivariance of the optimal beamforming policy, with an update equation designed according to the functional WMMSE iterations. Simulation results show that both the functional WMMSE algorithm and BeamINR outperform existing numerical and INR-based baselines. BeamINR approaches the sum rate of the functional WMMSE with substantially lower inference latency. Compared with INR-based baselines, BeamINR reduces training complexity and improves generalization to the number of users, CAPA sizes, and carrier~frequencies.

We study feedback stabilization of linear systems under data-rate constraints in the presence of completely unknown disturbances. A communication and control strategy is proposed based on sampled and quantized state measurements, where the quantization range is dynamically adjusted using reachable-set approximations and disturbance estimates derived from quantization parameters. The strategy alternates between stabilizing and searching stages to recapture the state after escapes from the quantization range. Under a data-rate condition, it guarantees input-to-state stability (ISS) with respect to the disturbance. An additional quantization symbol is introduced to establish ISS near the equilibrium. A simulation example illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

We consider a verification problem for opinion dynamics based on binary observations. The opinion dynamics is governed by a Friedkin-Johnsen (FJ) model, where only a sequence of binary outputs is available instead of the agents' continuous opinions. At every time-step we observe a binarized output for each agent depending on whether the opinion exceeds a fixed threshold. The objective is to verify whether an FJ model with a given set of stubbornness parameters and initial opinions can generate the observed binary outputs up to a small error. The FJ model is formulated as a transition system, and an approximate simulation relation of two transition systems is defined in terms of the proximity of their opinion trajectories and output sequences. We then construct a finite set of abstract FJ models by simplifying the influence matrix and discretizing the stubbornness parameters and the initial opinions. It is shown that the abstraction approximately simulates any concrete FJ model with continuous parameters and initial opinions, and is itself approximately simulated by some concrete FJ model. These results ensure that consistency verification can be performed over the finite abstraction. Specifically, by checking whether an abstract model satisfies the observation constraints, we can conclude whether the corresponding family of concrete FJ models is consistent with the binary observations. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the proposed verification framework.

Frequency-selective wireless power transfer provides a feasible route to enable independent actuation and control of multiple untethered robots in a common workspace; however, the scalability remains unquantified, particularly the maximum number of resonators that can be reliably addressed within a given frequency bandwidth. To address this, we formulate the relationship between resonator quality factor (Q-factor) and the number of individually addressable inductor-capacitor (LC) resonant energy harvesters within a fixed radio-frequency (RF) spectrum, and we convert selectively activated harvested energy into mechanical motion. We theoretically proved and experimentally demonstrated that scalability depends primarily on the Q-factor. For this proof-of-concept study, we define effective series resistance as a function of frequency allocating bandwidths to discrete actuators. We provide design equations for scaling untethered magnetic actuation with Q-factor optimization. Resonator networks spanning bandwidths from 100kHz to 1MHz were analyzed to quantify how increasing the number of resonators affects independent addressability. We validated the approach experimentally by fabricating three centimeter-scale untethered actuators that selectively trigger the motion of mechanical beams at 734kHz, 785kHz, and 855kHz. We also characterized the generated mechanical force and the activation bandwidth of each actuator, confirming that no unintended cross-triggering occurred.

Depthwise separable convolutional (DSConv) layers have been successfully applied to deep learning (DL)-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC) schemes to reduce computational complexity. However, a systematic investigation of the layerwise and ratio-wise replacement of standard convolutional (Conv) layers with DSConv layers in JSCC systems for wireless image transmission remains largely unexplored. In this letter, we propose a configurable lightweight JSCC framework that incorporates a selective replacement strategy, enabling flexible Conv-to-DSConv replacement at different replacement ratios and positions. By varying the replacement ratio, we obtain models with different computational complexities and analyze their impact on reconstruction performance. Furthermore, we investigate how replacements at different encoder and decoder depths influence reconstruction quality under a fixed replacement ratio. Our results show that Conv-to-DSConv replacement at the intermediate layers of the encoder and decoder achieves a favorable complexity-performance trade-off, revealing layer-wise redundancy in DL-based JSCC systems. Extensive experiments further demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves substantial parameter reduction with only slight performance degradation, enabling flexible complexity-performance trade-offs for resource-constrained edge devices.

Safe rehabilitation is an interaction-dynamics problem: the controller must regulate a prescribed motion while absorbing involuntary spasm, voluntary effort, actuator compliance, and model mismatch as interaction disturbances. This paper instantiates the predictive interaction-dynamics framework of the base pHRI formulation on a series-elastic-actuated knee joint. SEA feedforward reduces the gravity-compensated knee to the same constant-coefficient scalar double integrator used in the base framework, while a dynamic-residual measurement from spring deflection supplies an interaction-disturbance observation. A steady-state target converts the estimated disturbance into a cancelling input, and a finite-horizon quadratic program regulates deviations from that target under range-of-motion, torque, and velocity constraints. The evaluation is stiffness- and damping-matched so improvements cannot be attributed to higher impedance. Under a motion-opposing $15\unit{Nm}$ step, classical impedance and MPC without estimation produce about $500\unit{mrad}$ steady-state error, whereas Kalman-augmented interaction MPC reduces this to $1.17\unit{mrad}$ at 100~Hz and $0.70\unit{mrad}$ at 500~Hz; the 500~Hz peak is $7.27\unit{mrad}$. In 30 randomized trials, the 95th-percentile peak is $21.57\unit{mrad}$. Bounded Assist-as-Needed scheduling, a corrective-channel energy tank, inequality-constrained OSQP stress cases, direct MuJoCo execution, and a posture-clamped MyoSuite knee-slice run are implemented. The results support the SEA-knee instantiation of the interaction-dynamics framework while separating it from clinical intent recognition, full-system passivity, safety certification, hardware trials, and free-standing multi-joint validation.

Ambient Internet-of-Things backscatter devices at known locations can act as low-cost passive anchors by creating geometrically anchored reflected paths in cellular networks. Unlike reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, practical backscatter devices are independently controlled and lack a common phase reference; their modulation signatures may be known, but their reflection gains and residual phases are generally uncalibrated. We study how much localization information survives this incomplete per-device calibration in uplink non-line-of-sight (NLOS) positioning, where the direct NLOS path and the backscatter-assisted paths share an unknown scatterer. Treating the common channel gain, the relative backscatter response, and the residual device phases as nuisance parameters, we derive closed-form equivalent Fisher information matrices for calibrated, partially calibrated, and fully uncalibrated operation. The analysis shows that unknown device phases remove carrier-phase information from the backscatter-assisted paths, whereas joint uncertainty in the common gain and relative response leaves the direct NLOS path with only bandwidth-dependent delay information. The resulting position-domain bounds show that device count alone is insufficient: the passive anchors must also observe the common scatterer from sufficiently diverse directions. For joint single-snapshot identification of the user equipment and scatterer, at least two devices in two dimensions and three in three dimensions are necessary. The results identify deployment implications for Ambient Internet-of-Things positioning and show which calibration losses also apply to separable subpanel-based reconfigurable-surface architectures.

Energy-efficient neuromorphic computing at the edge requires simulation tools that can capture the non-ideal behavior of mixed-signal spiking neural network (SNN) hardware while supporting system-level design exploration. This work presents an open-source hardware-aware simulation framework for mixed-signal SNNs that enables comparative analysis across neuron, synapse and architecture choices. The framework supports multiple neuron models, including Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF), Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) and Axon-Hillock (AH), together with non-volatile analog synapses based on floating-gate transistors and ReRAM devices. By incorporating device-level nonlinearities directly into PyTorch-based training and inference, the tool enables optimization of physical synaptic parameters rather than idealized abstract weights. The framework is evaluated on standard neuromorphic benchmarks, including N-MNIST, DVS Gesture and Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD). For each model dataset configuration, it reports classification accuracy together with hardware-oriented metrics such as silicon area, power consumption and quantization sensitivity. These capabilities enable cross-layer design space exploration and help identify neuron-synapse configurations that best satisfy application-specific constraints on accuracy, energy efficiency, area and hardware fidelity.

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

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a significant research area within RL, where integrating constraints with rewards is crucial for enhancing safety and performance across diverse control tasks. In the context of heating systems in the buildings, optimizing the energy efficiency while maintaining the residents' thermal comfort can be intuitively formulated as a constrained optimization problem. However, to solve it with RL may require large amount of data. Therefore, an accurate and versatile simulator is favored. In this paper, we propose a novel building simulator I4B which provides interfaces for different usages and apply a model-free constrained RL algorithm named constrained Soft Actor-Critic with Linear Smoothed Log Barrier function (CSAC-LB) to the heating optimization problem. Benchmarking against baseline algorithms demonstrates CSAC-LB's efficiency in data exploration, constraint satisfaction and performance.

Space weather events pose a growing threat to modern economies, yet their macroeconomic consequences remain underexplored. This study presents the first dedicated economic assessment of geomagnetic storm impacts on Aotearoa New Zealand, quantifying potential gross domestic product (GDP) losses across seven conservative disruption and mitigation scenarios due to an extreme coronal mass ejection (CME). The primary focus is on the damaging impacts of geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) on the electrical power transmission network. We support space weather mitigation investment decisions by providing a first-order approximation of their potential economic benefits, using best-in-class scientific models, via a coupled physics-engineering-economic spatial modelling framework. Recognising uncertainty in the economic interpretation of power outage impacts, we compare four different estimation methods. In the most severe unmitigated scenario, estimated GDP losses reach NZD3.58 billion (0.98 percent of annual GDP). Targeted GIC-informed scenarios still produce material losses, with no mitigation reaching up to NZD1.48 billion (0.41 percent of annual GDP). Mitigation substantially reduces these impacts. Operational strategies, including optimized switching and islanding, achieve benefit-cost ratios as high as 330 to 1, while physical protections such as GIC blocking devices produce returns up to 34.4 to 1. When also acknowledging additional unmodelled impacts, including multi-billion losses in capital equipment and long-term revenue, the economic rationale for pre-emptive mitigation becomes even more pertinent.

Masked token prediction has emerged as a powerful pre-training objective across language, vision, and speech, offering the potential to unify these diverse modalities through a single pre-training task. However, its application for general audio understanding remains underexplored, with BEATs being the only notable example. BEATs has seen limited modifications due to the absence of open-source pre-training code. Furthermore, BEATs was trained only on AudioSet, restricting its broader downstream applicability. To address these gaps, we present OpenBEATs, an open-source framework that extends BEATs via multi-domain audio pre-training. We conduct comprehensive evaluations across six types of tasks, twenty five datasets, and three audio domains, including audio reasoning tasks such as audio question answering, entailment, and captioning. OpenBEATs achieves state-of-the-art performance on six bioacoustics datasets, two environmental sound datasets and five reasoning datasets, performing better than models exceeding a billion parameters at one-fourth their parameter size. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-domain datasets and masked token prediction task to learn general-purpose audio representations. To promote further research and reproducibility, we release all pre-training and evaluation code, pretrained and fine-tuned checkpoints, and training logs at this https URL

Photovoltaic (PV) panels are becoming increasingly widespread in the domain of renewable energy, and thus, small efficiency gains can have massive effects. Anti-reflective and self-cleaning coatings enhance panel performance but degrade over time, requiring periodic reapplication. Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer a flexible and autonomous way to apply protective coatings more often and at lower cost compared to traditional manual coating methods. We present a quadcopter-based system, equipped with a liquid dispersion mechanism, designed to automate such tasks. The localization stack only uses onboard sensors, relying on visual-inertial odometry and the relative position of the PV panel detected with respect to the quadcopter. The control relies on a model-based controller that accounts for the ground effect and the mass decrease of the quadcopter during liquid dispersion. We validate the autonomy capabilities of our system through extensive indoor and outdoor experiments.

Magnitude, obtained as a special case of Euler characteristic of enriched category, represents a sense of the size of metric spaces and is related to classical notions such as cardinality, dimension, and volume. While the studies have explained the meaning of magnitude from various perspectives, continuity also gives a valuable view of magnitude. Based on established results about continuity of magnitude and maximum diversity, this article focuses on continuity of weighting, a distribution whose totality is magnitude, and its variation corresponding to maximum diversity. Meanwhile, recent studies also illuminated the connection between magnitude and data analysis by applying magnitude theory to point clouds representing the data or the set of model parameters. This article will also provide an application for time series analysis by introducing a new kind of invariants of periodic time series, where the invariance follows directly from the continuity results. As a use-case, a simple machine learning experiment is conducted with real-world data, in which the suggested invariants improved the performance.

In this paper, we consider nonlinear control systems subject to bounded disturbances and to both state and input constraints. We introduce the definition of robust admissible set - the set of all initial states from which the state and input constraints can be satisfied for all times against all admissible disturbances. We focus on its boundary that can be decomposed into the usable part on the state constraint boundary and the barrier, interior to the state constraints. We show that, at the intersection of these two components, the boundary of the robust admissible set must be tangent to the state constraint set and separate the interior of the robust admissible set and its complement, a property that we call the ultimate locally separating hyperplane condition. Moreover, we prove that the barrier must satisfy a saddle-point principle on a Hamiltonian, based on Pontryagin's maximum principle, whose final condition is precisely the ultimate locally separating condition, thus providing a set of differential equations made of the system and its adjoint for a direct construction of the barrier. Lastly, we illustrate our results by calculating the robust admissible set for an adaptive cruise control example.

This paper presents an efficient model predictive path integral (MPPI) control framework for systems with complex nonlinear dynamics. To improve the computational efficiency of classic MPPI while preserving control performance, we replace the nonlinear dynamics used for trajectory propagation with a learned linear deep Koopman operator (DKO) model, enabling faster rollout and more efficient trajectory sampling. The DKO dynamics are learned directly from interaction data, eliminating the need for analytical system models. The resulting controller, termed MPPI-DK, is evaluated in simulation on pendulum balancing and surface vehicle navigation tasks, and validated on hardware through reference-tracking experiments on a quadruped robot. Experimental results demonstrate that MPPI-DK achieves control performance close to MPPI with true dynamics while substantially reducing computational cost, enabling efficient real-time control on robotic platforms.

3D semantic occupancy prediction is a cornerstone of robotic perception, yet real-world voxel annotations are inherently corrupted by structural artifacts and dynamic trailing effects. This raises a critical but underexplored question: can autonomous systems safely rely on such unreliable occupancy supervision? To systematically investigate this issue, we establish OccNL, the first benchmark dedicated to 3D occupancy under occupancy-asymmetric and dynamic trailing noise. Our analysis reveals a fundamental domain gap: state-of-the-art 2D label noise learning strategies collapse catastrophically in sparse 3D voxel spaces, exposing a critical vulnerability in existing paradigms. To address this challenge, we propose DPR-Occ, a principled label-noise-robust framework that constructs reliable supervision through dual-source partial label reasoning. By synergizing temporal model memory with representation-level structural affinity, DPR-Occ dynamically expands and prunes candidate label sets to preserve true semantics while suppressing noise propagation. Extensive experiments on SemanticKITTI demonstrate that DPR-Occ prevents geometric and semantic collapse under extreme corruption. Notably, even at 90% label noise, our method achieves significant performance gains (up to 2.57% mIoU and 13.91% IoU) over existing label noise learning baselines adapted to the 3D occupancy prediction task. By bridging label noise learning and 3D perception, OccNL and DPR-Occ provide a reliable foundation for safety-critical robotic perception in dynamic environments. The benchmark and source code will be made publicly available at this https URL.

While multi-audio understanding is critical for large audio-language models (LALMs), it remains underexplored. We introduce MUGEN, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating this capability across speech, general audio, and music. Our experiments reveal consistent weaknesses in multi-audio settings, and performance degrades sharply as the number of concurrent audio inputs increases, identifying input scaling as a fundamental bottleneck. We further investigate training-free strategies and observe that Audio-Permutational Self-Consistency, which diversifies the order of audio candidates, helps models form more robust aggregated predictions, yielding up to 6.28% accuracy gains. Combining this permutation strategy with Chain-of-Thought further improves performance to 6.74%. These results expose blind spots in current LALMs and provide a foundation for evaluating complex auditory comprehension.

Inertial measurement unit-based online handwriting recognition enables the recognition of input signals collected across different writing surfaces but remains challenged by uneven character distributions and inter-writer variability. In this work, we systematically investigate two strategies to address these issues: subword tokenization and concatenation-based data augmentation. Our experiments on the OnHW-Words500 dataset reveal a clear dichotomy between handling inter-writer and intra-writer variance. On the writer-independent split, structural abstraction via Bigram tokenization significantly improves generalization to unseen writing styles, reducing the word error rate (WER) from 15.40% to 12.99%. In contrast, on the writer-dependent split, tokenization degrades performance due to vocabulary distribution shifts between the training and validation sets. Instead, our proposed concatenation-based data augmentation acts as a powerful regularizer, reducing the character error rate by 34.5% and the WER by 25.4%. Further analysis shows that short, low-level tokens benefit model performance and that the performance gains from concatenation-based data augmentation surpass those achieved by proportionally extended training. These findings reveal a clear variance-dependent effect: subword tokenization primarily mitigates inter-writer stylistic variability, whereas concatenation-based data augmentation effectively compensates for intra-writer distributional sparsity.

Non-fixed flexible antenna architectures, such as fluid antenna system (FAS), movable antenna (MA), and pinching antenna, have garnered significant interest in recent years. Among them, rotatable antenna (RA) has emerged as a promising technology for enhancing wireless communication and sensing performance through flexible antenna orientation/boresight rotation. By enabling mechanical or electronic boresight adjustment without altering physical antenna positions, RA introduces additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) beyond conventional beamforming. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive tutorial on the fundamentals, architectures, and applications of RA-empowered wireless networks. Specifically, we begin by reviewing the historical evolution of RA-related technologies and clarifying the distinctive role of RA among flexible antenna architectures. Then, we establish a unified mathematical framework for RA-enabled systems, including general antenna/array rotation models, as well as channel models that cover near- and far-field propagation characteristics, wideband frequency selectivity, and polarization effects. Building upon this foundation, we investigate antenna/array rotation optimization in representative communication and sensing scenarios. Furthermore, we examine RA channel estimation/acquisition strategies encompassing orientation scheduling mechanisms and signal processing methods that exploit multi-view channel observations. Beyond theoretical modeling and algorithmic design, we discuss practical RA configurations and deployment strategies. We also present recent RA prototypes and experimental results that validate the practical performance gains enabled by antenna rotation. Finally, we highlight promising extensions of RA to emerging wireless paradigms and outline open challenges to inspire future research.

Phone recognition (PR) is a key enabler of multilingual and low-resource speech processing tasks, yet robust performance remains elusive. Highly performant English-focused models do not generalize across languages, while multilingual models underutilize pretrained representations. It also remains unclear how data scale, architecture, and training objective contribute to multilingual PR. We present PhoneticXEUS -- trained on large-scale multilingual data and achieving state-of-the-art performance on both multilingual (17.7% PFER) and accented English speech (10.6% PFER). Through controlled ablations with evaluations across 100+ languages under a unified scheme, we empirically establish our training recipe and quantify the impact of SSL representations, data scale, and loss objectives. In addition, we analyze error patterns across language families, accented speech, and articulatory features. All data and code are released openly at this https URL

We study multi-robot persistent monitoring on weighted graphs, where node weights encode monitoring priorities and edge weights encode travel distances. The goal is to design joint robot trajectories that minimize the worst-case weighted latency across all nodes over an infinite time horizon. The widely adopted worst-case latency objective evaluates team performance over the entire time horizon and therefore may fail to distinguish strategies with poor transient behavior but strong asymptotic performance. To address this limitation, we propose a family of tail-performance objectives that generalize the standard objective and study the resulting functional optimization problems. We establish several key theoretical properties, including the existence of optimal strategies, relationships among the proposed objectives and their corresponding optimization problems, approximation by periodic solutions to arbitrary accuracy, and reductions to event-driven decision models with discretized waiting times. Building on these results, we construct an equivalent event-driven Markov decision process (MDP), called the Tail Worst-case Latency-Optimizing Markov Decision Process (TWLO-MDP), which reformulates the tail-performance objective as a standard average-reward criterion. We then develop reinforcement-learning-based solution methods for the TWLO-MDP and introduce the multi-robot monitoring benchmark (M2Bench), a unified platform that supports the evaluation and comparison of heuristic and learning-based monitoring algorithms. Experiments on synthetic and realistic monitoring scenarios show that our methods effectively reduce the worst-case weighted latency and outperform representative baselines.

From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation.

In this paper, we propose the frameworks of generalized performance evaluation and generalized controller synthesis. To this end, we give a true concurrent process calculus as the model of systems, and present a lattice-valued performance evaluation language as the performance specification of systems. We give a framework of generalized performance evaluation based on the process calculus and the performance evaluation language. We show that the several problems in computer science are special cases of generalized performance evaluation. A generalized performance evaluation algorithm is presented. Furthermore, we present a framework of generalized controller synthesis, which is the inverse problem of generalized performance evaluation. We show several special cases of generalized controller synthesis in computer science, and give an outline of generalized controller synthesis algorithm.

Manipulating fragile deformable containers, such as disposable plastic cups filled with liquid, demands real-time grip-force adaptation within an extremely narrow force margin: insufficient force causes slip, while excessive force irreversibly deforms the thin wall. Existing approaches struggle to achieve such force-sensitive manipulation tasks. We propose a noise-statistics-based calibration-driven reflex control paradigm with vision-based tactile sensing: by analyzing the sensor's intrinsic noise characteristics (via a brief static-hold-and-unload protocol), we directly derive all controller thresholds, eliminating external force calibration, trial-and-error manual tuning, or material-specific physical models. Instantiating this paradigm, we present TactileReflex, a three-channel closed-loop controller that extracts three image-level proxies, shear intensity ($S_y$), contact intensity ($F_n$), and center of pressure ($C$), from dual visuo-tactile sensors and drives prioritized reflex channels at ~12 Hz for slip suppression, weight-adaptive release, and force protection. Each channel closes the loop directly on its proxy via noise-derived thresholds. Ablation demonstrates that only the full three-channel system is able to prevent irreversible container deformation (5/5 success vs. at most 1/5 for partial configurations). In a dynamic pouring task, fixed-effort baselines fail in all 10 attempts due to pose drift, while TactileReflex achieves 9/10 success across two water volumes. As a self-contained and interpretable controller, TactileReflex can serve as a plug-and-play safety layer beneath high-level manipulation pipelines, including haptic-free VR teleoperation and vision-language-action (VLA) policies.

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving disentangled representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-output decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

Safe physical human--robot interaction on floating-base robots requires interaction regulation under changing contact constraints. We develop a contact-consistent normalization in which the residual end-effector channel is represented as a linear double integrator in acceleration coordinates. Both discrete prediction matrices are independent of configuration and support mode; posture and contact enter only through task-inertia force recovery and constraints. The controller combines a constant-Hessian receding-horizon QP, an acceleration-disturbance observer, and a priority-consistent realization. Classical operational-space impedance is shown to be the unconstrained infinite-horizon limit. MuJoCo experiments on a 17-DOF biped and a Menagerie-derived Unitree G1 model evaluate sustained forces, transmitted shocks, and scheduled contact-model changes. Disturbance estimation is the dominant source of fixed-stance accuracy, while covariance inflation gives only scenario-dependent transient benefit. Dynamic walking and hardware validation remain outside the present evidence.

Underwater vehicles operate from a fixed onboard energy budget that propulsion rapidly depletes, so a controller that completes its task while drawing less thruster power directly extends mission range and endurance. Reinforcement learning yields capable model-free controllers for station-keeping and trajectory tracking, but optimizing task accuracy alone drives the policy toward oscillatory, energy-wasting actuation. The established remedy subtracts an energy penalty from the reward, yet this sets the task-power trade-off through a single weight with no physical units: a target power level cannot be specified, the weight must be re-tuned for every vehicle and task, and a mismatched weight can even raise power. This paper instead formulates energy-efficient underwater control as a constrained Markov decision process in which average thruster power is subject to an explicit budget, solved with a PPO-Lagrangian algorithm. The power level is set by declaring a budget in physical units, and a single dual variable is updated online to meet it for each vehicle and task, without manual weight search. Across three vehicles and four tasks in the MarineGym simulator, the energy-constrained policy draws the least power in all twelve settings, reducing it by 14--65\% (up to 64.9\%) over a task-only baseline and below an energy-reward baseline everywhere, while remaining the smoothest in ten settings and preserving task accuracy except in one deliberately power-limited regime. Imposing energy as an explicit constraint thus offers a tuning-free route to energy-efficient underwater control that needs no per-vehicle, per-task weight search.

How much does a vocalization change over the course of development? We propose trajectory variance, a per-vocalization plasticity score that answers this question without type labels. A displacement model learns to predict age-conditioned shifts in autoencoder latent space; the variance of its predictions across target ages quantifies how much each vocalization would change if produced at different developmental stages. Evaluated on three zebra finches (183K-274K vocalizations, 40-101 days post-hatch), trajectory variance separates learned song syllables from innate calls (Cohen's d = 0.29-0.57, AUC = 0.58-0.67, after controlling for duration), while no nonparametric baseline achieves consistent separation. Trajectory variance also correlates with spectral flatness across all three birds (r = -0.48 to -0.75): more plastic vocalizations tend to have more tonal, structured spectra.