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Tuesday 1 September

Signal Processing

Rotatable Antenna Enabled Multi-Satellite Communications: Joint Satellite Selection and Boresight Trajectory Optimization

This paper considers a satellite-to-ground communication system in which a ground station (GS) equipped with independently rotatable antenna (RA) elements jointly decodes independent streams from multiple low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites over a shared time–frequency resource. Specifically, we formulate a two-timescale throughput maximization problem under exogenous cochannel interference, capturing serving-set composition, RA-enabled channel shaping, time-varying satellite geometry, and mechanically constrained inter-epoch reconfiguration. We first characterize the joint effects of interference-whitened channel strength and spatial separability on multi-satellite reception, motivating the joint design of satellite selection and RA control. With the RA trajectory fixed, we establish the monotone submodularity of the epoch-level selection objective and construct an incumbent-tight modular lower-bound surrogate, leading to an efficient discrete Minorization-Maximization (MM) selection algorithm. For fixed serving sets, we develop slew-feasible RA updates based on Riemannian gradients and organize them into a two-color parallel update scheme. The two blocks are integrated into a monotone alternating algorithm with guaranteed objective convergence. Simulations demonstrate consistent gains over benchmark schemes and reveal an optimal balance between channel strength and spatial separability. The results further show that satellite selection is particularly important in underloaded and actuator-limited regimes, whereas RA shaping becomes more influential near full spatial loading.
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All authors Xingxiang Peng, Qingqing Wu, Haiying Hu, Wen Chen, Xin Lin

Signal Processing

Sharp Minimax Limits and Compatibility Spectra for Critical Near-DFT Index-Only Frequency Estimation

An $M$-channel discrete Fourier transform (DFT) channelizer routes an on-grid sinusoid to a single output. When each frame reports only one energy-proportional channel index, signed sub-bin frequency estimation becomes nonregular: dark-channel probability is quadratic in the offset, whereas orientation enters cubically. We study $N$ independent labeled reports under a known uniform-replacement probability $\epsilon_N$ and a single deterministic unitary shared by all frequencies and frames, constrained to routing defect $\tau/N$. If $\sqrt{N}\epsilon_N \to \lambda < \infty$, we establish an attained global-in-frequency minimax limit at the critical scales $N^{-1/4}$ for frequency offset, $N^{-1/2}$ for unitary perturbation and replacement, and $N^{-1}$ for routing defect. The effective unitary tangent is a symmetric complete-graph edge field modulo one centering nuisance, and its first variation is a radius-dependent weighted divergence. For $\lambda>0$, evaluation at $k$ distinct normalized offset magnitudes yields an exact Fourier-Cauchy nullity spectrum: $\lfloor(M-1)/2\rfloor$ evaluations are necessary and sufficient, for every choice of distinct magnitudes, to certify neutrality at all magnitudes. The terminal nullspace has a greatest-common-divisor dimension formula and positive-definite aggregate curvature. Consequently, exact DFT routing is uniquely minimax within the complete critical tangent class for $M=3$, whereas every positive critical defect budget strictly improves the minimax constant for $M\geq4$. The analysis also yields a smallest-prime curvature-visibility law and, for $M\geq5$, discontinuous compatibility geometry but a continuous minimax value at the zero critical replacement floor $\lambda=0$.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design of a Lightweight PCG Equalizer with a Fixed Step Size for Massive MIMO

Coarse quantization in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems reduces power but causes clipping distortions. The Bayesian Expectation-Maximization (BEM) algorithm can recover clipped signals, but its matrix inversion and dynamic step-size evaluation are hardware bottlenecks. We propose a hardware-friendly one-step correction that uses the initial Jacobi-preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) direction with a fixed relaxation parameter. The resulting symbol-level update has an ultra-lightweight $\mathcal{O}(U)$ feed-forward datapath and approaches high-resolution reference detectors in the evaluated massive-MIMO setting. Our finite-dimensional analysis establishes the exact one-step descent law, proves that Jacobi normalization cancels the raw multiplicative near-far scaling while confining the loaded-system dependence to bounded attenuation factors, and gives verifiable sufficient conditions for fixed-step descent in terms of normalized channel coherence. System-level results indicate projected power savings for energy-efficient massive MIMO uplinks.
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All authors Junshuo Wang, Shuting Liu, Shihan Wang, Yan Tian, Jienan Chen

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CR

MROP: Mask-Region Optimized Purification Against Backdoor Attack in Deep JSCC

Deep joint source and channel coding (JSCC) transmits a source by mapping it directly to channel symbols through an end-to-end deep neural network (DNN) and reconstructing it at the receiver. Taking image transmission as an application, this DNN pipeline behaves as a black box: the receiver cannot readily detect security attacks when the transmitted images are corrupted, thereby introducing a new security vulnerability. In this letter, we study defense against input-patch backdoor attacks on deep JSCC, in which a small trigger patch attached to the input forces the decoder to emit an attacker-chosen target image. Most existing patch-trigger defenses are designed for classification, leaving the reconstruction setting of deep JSCC unaddressed. We adapt the gradient mask defense to this reconstruction setting as a baseline and then propose mask-region optimized purification (MROP), which operates at inference and requires no retraining of the JSCC model. Unlike the baseline, which localizes the trigger from the input–output gradient, MROP instead places a per-pixel mask at the encoder input and optimizes it via a Gumbel-sigmoid relaxation to localize the trigger, then refines the trigger region to reconstruct the pure images better. In numerical results, we evaluate the proposed method on CIFAR-10 and STL-10 datasets along with the DeepJSCC and SwinJSCC models. By doing so, we show that the proposed method substantially lowers the attack success rate (ASR) while preserving the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of clean reconstructions.
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All authors Seongkyu Yang, Hyeonho Noh, Hyun Jong Yang, Jonggyu Jang

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Design and Implementation of a Kalman Filter-Infused Algorithm for Tilt Estimation

Accurate tilt angle estimation is important in many engineering applications, such as robotics, motion tracking, and embedded control systems. However, measurements from low-cost inertial sensors are often degraded by noise and drift. This paper presents a single-axis tilt angle estimation system based on the MPU6050 inertial measurement unit, implemented on an RP2040 microcontroller platform, with sensor fusion achieved through a Kalman filter. The accelerometer provides a direct estimate of tilt angle from gravity but is sensitive to noise and short-term fluctuations. The gyroscope provides smooth angular rate measurements, but integration over time introduces drift. To overcome these limitations, a Kalman filter is used to combine measurements from both sensors, leveraging the long-term stability of the accelerometer and the short-term smoothness of the gyroscope. Both simulation and hardware experiments are performed. In simulation, sensor noise and drift are modeled to evaluate the filter performance under control conditions. In the hardware implementation, real-time MPU6050 data is acquired and processed by the RP2040 platform, and the estimated tilt angle is compared with accelerometer-only and gyroscope-only outputs. The results show that the proposed method effectively reduces noise measurements and suppresses long-term drift while preserving good dynamic response. Overall, the system provides more stable and accurate tilt estimation than either sensor alone, demonstrating a practical and accessible approach for Kalman filter based sensor fusion in embedded application. This manuscript is a preprint version of the work. Keywords: Kalman Filter, Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Noise Reduction, Angle Tracking
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

MaskCode: Mask Transformer for Feedback-Assisted Coding With Linear Block Codes

Feedback-based coding schemes have demonstrated substantial performance gains over today's open-loop coding schemes. Unfortunately, these gains are usually achieved in idealized settings with perfect feedback. Over the last few years, machine learning-based schemes have been shown to be promising solutions for implementing feedback-based codes, particularly when combined with short-block-length open-loop error correcting codes (ECCs) in a concatenated coding structure. However, existing ML-based feedback schemes remain agnostic to the outer code's structure, potentially misallocating feedback resources on error patterns already correctable by the outer ECC. To address this, we propose MaskCode, a Transformer-based inner feedback code for concatenated coding systems, which explicitly incorporates structural knowledge of the outer linear block code into the inner feedback encoder design via two synergistic mechanisms: 1) a soft syndrome-based input that informs the encoder about potential parity constraint violations, and 2) a code-aware attention mask derived from the Tanner graph. We further show that end-to-end training with a differentiable belief propagation (BP) decoder offers no additional gain, as MaskCode's structure-aware design already internalizes the structural knowledge of the outer code; in fact, backpropagation through the iterative BP decoder introduces gradient explosion, which degrades rather than improves performance. Extensive evaluations on BCH and LDPC outer codes demonstrate that MaskCode consistently outperforms all baselines, achieving up to 1.5 dB SNR gain.
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All authors Jonggyu Jang, Hongjae Nam, Vishrant Tripathi, David J. Love, Hyun Jong Yang

Signal Processing

Cross-View Vision-Aided Proactive BS Selection and Beam Prediction for mmWave V2I Communications

This paper investigates environmental-sensing-aided proactive base station (BS) selection and beam prediction for millimeter-wave (mmWave) vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) wireless systems. We exploit onboard panoramic street-view images and a preloaded satellite map to predict communication-relevant environmental information around the vehicle, including nearby building footprints and heights. The predicted height map provides a compact environmental prior and is combined with historical mobility information to jointly predict the next-slot line-of-sight (LoS) state, transmission rate, and transmit and receive beam selections. On our dataset covering different real-world regions across New South Wales, Australia, the proposed framework achieves 91.4% LoS classification accuracy, 0.638 bps/Hz mean absolute error of data rate prediction, and more than 40% higher transmission rate than the conventional reactive baseline in geographically unseen regions, outperforming all evaluated deployable learning-based baselines. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/Huzijiao/Cross-view_V2I
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All authors Zijiao Hu, Haiyao Yu, Gaoyang Pang, Guangchen Wang, Litianyi Zhang, Wanchun Liu, George C. Alexandropoulos, Branka Vucetic, Yonghui Li

Signal Processing

BeamRMX: Radiation-Pattern-Driven Learning for Generalizable Beam Radio Map Prediction and Beam Management

The evolution toward sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks is driving larger antenna arrays and highly directional multi-beam transmission, making accurate knowledge of beam-dependent spatial coverage important for beam management and environment-aware network operation. Radio maps (RMs) provide such a representation, yet conventional RM prediction assumes omnidirectional or transmitter-level radiation. In beamformed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, one propagation scene instead gives rise to many configuration-dependent beam radio maps (BeamRMs), creating challenges in beam representation and generalization. Existing methods either condition prediction on beam descriptors or use beam maps as auxiliary inputs to generic architectures. We propose BeamRMX, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first dedicated framework to treat the spatial radiation pattern as the primary BeamRM query and learn how scene geometry transforms it into the received power field. XBase learns multiscale interactions between the radiation query and scene geometry, while an optional Evidence Adapter uses a few cross-configuration BeamRMs from the same scene. Matched-domain and zero-shot experiments show consistent gains over deterministic and diffusion baselines, including mean absolute error reductions of 26.1% on unseen scenes and 47.8% on an unseen configuration. Cross-configuration evidence further improves reconstruction and intra-sector beam refinement.
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All authors Yue Zhang, Xiucheng Wang, Wenshuo Chen, Nan Cheng

Signal Processing

Real-Time Neuromorphic Spectrum Intelligence Simulator

We present the Real-Time Neuromorphic Spectrum Intelligence Simulator (RT-NuSIS), a modular framework to study spiking neural network (SNN) and memristor-inspired agents for dynamic spectrum access under constrained energy budgets and adversarial conditions. RT-NuSIS couples leaky integrate-and-fire neuronal dynamics, memristive synaptic models, physics-informed energy-harvesting models (triboelectric and RF), and adversary models including jamming and Byzantine behavior. We formalize the simulator mathematically, prove boundedness, present a mean-field adversary threshold, analyze per-step complexity, and provide a reproducible benchmark harness for energy-per-inference, latency, and robustness metrics. The codebase is modular, deterministic by seed, and designed for large-scale event-driven simulations.
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Signal Processing

Delay-Doppler Sensing Performance Analysis for MIMO-OFDM ISAC Systems

In communication-centric integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), delay-Doppler sensing reuses data-bearing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals rather than dedicated radar probing waveforms. Consequently, the resulting range-Doppler map (RDM) is shaped not only by target parameters, but also by communication-symbol randomness and, in multi-antenna transmissions, by spatial beamforming. While existing analyses have largely focused on single-antenna OFDM-ISAC, the delay-Doppler sensing behavior of multi-antenna OFDM-ISAC remains insufficiently understood. This paper analyzes a multi-input multi-output (MIMO)-OFDM-ISAC system in which multiple data streams jointly illuminate a sensing target. We derive second-order moment expressions for the RDM under matched filtering (MF) and reciprocal filtering (RF), and use them to characterize the dynamic range (DR). The analysis reveals two key multi-stream effects. First, under MF, the random superposition of multiple beamformed streams creates an additional RDM floor beyond the modulation-dependent and receiver-noise terms; therefore, constant-modulus signaling no longer eliminates the data-induced pedestal as in single-antenna OFDM-ISAC. Second, under RF, the matched-angle data-induced floor is removed, but the noise floor is amplified according to the reciprocal-power statistics of the beamformed target illumination. These results show that the user-target angular geometry directly governs the MF/RF tradeoff: MF is more robust under weak illumination, whereas RF can achieve a higher DR when reciprocal-noise amplification is mild. Numerical results validate the analysis and demonstrate the distinct geometry-dependent behaviors of MF and RF.
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All authors Peishi Li, Rang Liu, Qian Liu, Ming Li

Monday 31 August

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from math.OC

Operational Regimes in Non-Convex Optimization: A Multiplier-Based Taxonomy

This paper introduces a structural taxonomy for constrained non-convex optimization based on the signature of Lagrange multipliers at KKT stationary points. Leveraging a unified game-theoretic interpretation of eight classical algorithm families–including block coordinate descent, ADMM, generalized Benders decomposition, successive convex approximation, interior-point methods, mirror descent, Frank-Wolfe, and Riemannian gradient descent–we show that the normalized multiplier vector carries an algorithm-independent structural fingerprint. Four scale-free shape features of this vector partition the dual space into five operational regimes: Unconstrained, Resource-Limited, Saturation, Strongly-Coupled, and Hybrid. We establish four structural theorems characterizing the partition: invariance under natural KKT symmetries, local stability under data perturbation with explicit Lipschitz margins from Robinson's strong regularity, codimension-one regime transitions, and the topological identification of the Hybrid regime as the Lebesgue-null boundary of the core regimes. A linear-time classifier is proposed with provable guarantees on correctness, iteration stabilization, sample complexity, and online tracking under data drift. Numerical experiments on 104 mixed-integer nonlinear programs and a downlink beamforming instance validate the theoretical predictions. The framework provides a foundational tool for regime-aware algorithm design and robustness analysis in non-convex optimization.
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Signal Processing

A Deep Iterative Refinement Receiver for OTFS Symbol Detection in Doubly-Dispersive Channels

Orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) modulation has emerged as a promising candidate for high-mobility wireless communication systems due to the diversity it offers across both time and frequency. Reliable OTFS detection, however, remains challenging under doubly-dispersive channels, where delay and Doppler dispersion induce structured interference between transmitted symbols and complicate symbol recovery. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage iterative OTFS detector that integrates a physics-informed learned initializer with an iterative refinement network, enabling progressively more accurate symbol estimates in doubly-dispersive channels. The initializer incorporates the known delay-Doppler input-output relationship to produce a robust first-stage estimate, while the refinement stage iteratively suppresses residual symbol interference in the delay-Doppler domain. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed detector achieves consistent performance gains over conventional and existing learning-based detectors across a variety of channel conditions. These results highlight the effectiveness of incorporating known channel structure into the detection process and using iterative refinement for improved and robust OTFS detection.
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Signal Processing

Physiological Information Reliability: Cross-Layer Adaptive Resource Allocation for Cardiovascular Sensing

Cardiovascular sensing systems must preserve clinically useful information despite signal degradation, wireless losses, energy constraints, and edge-computation latency. We introduce Physiological Information Reliability (PIR), a cross-layer framework that represents physiological information value jointly with wireless, energy, and computation states and uses a contextual bandit to adapt sensing and communication decisions. We integrate multimodal ECG/PPG signal-quality estimation with physiological information value and an adaptive network-coding layer under burst-erasure conditions. Across controlled multiseed experiments, PIR-LinUCB demonstrates a promising low-energy operating point while maintaining medical latency constraints and competitive physiological estimation performance relative to fixed and heuristic policies. We analyze the resulting accuracy-energy-latency trade-offs and identify limitations of proxy PIV estimation and simulated communication dynamics. These results provide an initial computational demonstration of physiological-information-aware resource allocation and motivate future clinical and real-channel validation.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD

XVAE-WMT: Explainable Wavelet-Temporal Variational Autoencoder for Blind Source Separation of Heart and Lung Sounds

The separation of cardiovascular sounds is a critical task in biomedical signal processing. In this paper, we introduce XVAE-WMT1, an unsupervised explainable generative AI algorithm combining a variational autoencoder (VAE) with explainable AI (XAI), wavelet-based inputs, a post-hoc output mask, and temporal consistency (TC) loss. Unlike existing supervised and VAE-based methods that rely on Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) and ignore latent interpretability, XVAE-WMT requires no paired clean recordings and integrates a Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) front-end for superior time-frequency localization. We assessed the latent space interpretability via different metrics, with SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) enabling dimensionality reduction to the top 75% of latent features while preserving separation quality. Evaluated across two datasets using Signal-to-Distortion Ratio (SDR), Signal-to-Interference Ratio (SIR), and Signal-to-Artifacts Ratio (SAR), XVAE-WMT attains 26.8 dB SDR, 32.8 dB SIR, and 28.6 dB SAR.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Local Private Information Retrieval for Graph-Based Replicated Systems

We rethink the definition of privacy in multi-server, graph-replicated private information retrieval (PIR) systems, by introducing a novel setting where the user's privacy is governed by the servers' storage structure. In classical graph-replicated PIR, the user retrieves a single message stored at the servers, while hiding the message index from each server. In our proposed privacy setting, the user is concerned with hiding the message index from a particular server, only if that server stores the message being retrieved, and privacy is not imposed otherwise. We coin this relaxed privacy requirement as local user privacy and the resulting PIR problem as local PIR on the graph. Our focus is on two-replicated PIR systems, where every message is replicated twice and stored on two distinct servers. Specifically, we study local PIR systems where the storage is represented by simple graphs, i.e., every pair of vertices is associated with at most one edge, and by their multigraph extension, i.e., $r$ parallel edges replace every edge. For these settings, we establish bounds on the local PIR capacity, defined as the maximum number of message symbols retrieved, per downloaded symbol. The local privacy requirement yields significant capacity gain over the classical PIR capacity under the same storage structure. For instance, in settings where the graph is a disjoint union of multiple identical sub-graphs, the gain in the local PIR capacity over classical PIR capacity is multiplicative in the number of sub-graphs. Further, for connected graphs, we derive capacity lower bounds for edge-transitive and bipartite graphs, which are greater than the best-known PIR capacity bounds. From these and by establishing matching upper bounds, we exactly characterize the capacity for star graphs, cyclic graphs, and path graphs with odd number of vertices. We introduce two local PIR schemes for general graphs.
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Signal Processing

Learning to deform the matched filter

Analytical signal-processing blocks are interpretable and reliable, but their optimality depends on assumptions that practical hardware and channels violate. Learned replacements can adapt, but often discard the structure that makes the original solution understandable. Here we introduce deformable matched filtering, a platform in which learning steers a bounded deformation of an explicit matched filter instead of replacing the waveform-processing path. In a hardware-in-the-loop optical wireless link, blind state descriptors drive causal, pilotless updates while payload samples, transmitted references, and condition labels remain outside the controller. Receiver deformation generalises across held-out signalling and channel conditions and remains ahead of a span-matched fractionally spaced equaliser after stationary convergence in most tested regimes. A transferable transmitter deformation reduces error-vector magnitude in all 144 held-out evaluations, whereas its additional value after receiver adaptation emerges principally under severe combined distortion. KAN, MLP, and linear controllers provide different condition-dependent advantages within the same filter structure. During 24 hours of uninterrupted changing-condition operation, bounded deformable receivers recover their original operating regime after severe intervening distortion while the persistent conventional equaliser accumulates destructive state. These results establish deformable analytical filters as a reusable middle ground between fixed theory and end-to-end learned signal processing.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Semantic Freshness Optimal Sampling and Transmission for Gossiping Receivers

We study the optimal joint sampling and transmission policy for a transmitter communicating with two gossiping receivers that share information with each other, with the objective of tracking a source under the Version Age of Information (VAoI) metric. The transmitter can observe source-version changes, but it has to pay a sampling cost to get the current source information content. Similarly, it can communicate with a receiver by paying a transmission cost. Gossiping enables local information exchange and is able to reduce costly direct transmissions. With imperfect communication links, we formulate an infinite-horizon average-cost Markov Decision Process (MDP) to jointly minimize receiver VAoI, sampling cost, and transmission cost. Using Relative Value Iteration (RVI), we evaluate the optimal policy and establish several properties of its structure. We prove that sampling has a threshold structure in the transmitter VAoI. Among direct transmissions, it is optimal to serve the older receiver. We further characterize the transmit or idle decision through the receiver VAoI difference. Our analysis shows that link reliability and receiver VAoI imbalance have a significant effect on the optimal policy structure. Numerical results verify the structural properties and demonstrate the performance gains of the optimal policy over multiple baselines.
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Signal Processing

XAI2CSI: Interpreting CSI with eXplainable AI for Human Activity Recognition

Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) has emerged as a key enabler for device-free Human Activity Recognition (HAR), enabling low-cost, unobtrusive sensing using existing communication infrastructure. However, Deep Learning (DL) models trained on CSI data often struggle to generalize across users, environments, and device setups due to the context sensitivity of wireless propagation. Despite this challenge, limited attention has been devoted to understanding model decisions and generalization failures. This paper introduces XAI2CSI, a framework that leverages eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) to analyze DL-based CSI sensing systems. XAI2CSI employs SAGE, a model-agnostic explainability method, to quantify temporal, spectral, and spatial CSI contributions to HAR decisions under nominal and cross-context evaluations on IEEE 802.11ax data. Our analysis reveals that the considered DL model exhibits limited robustness to unseen conditions due to an over-reliance on context-specific CSI patterns, causing models to misinterpret the underlying signal dynamics when deployment conditions change. The proposed methodology and findings provide a reference framework to explore alternative solutions and guide the development of robust, transparent Wi-Fi sensing systems.
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All authors Idio Guarino, Alfredo Nascita, Domenico Ciuonzo, Damiano Carra, Antonio Pescapé

Signal Processing

Semantic-Aware Sub-Band Allocation for Terahertz Communications

This paper studies semantic-aware sub-band al- location for terahertz (THz) communication systems, where frequency-selective molecular absorption creates highly non- uniform sub-band qualities. Unlike conventional formulations, semantic fidelity depends nonlinearly on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and is also sentence-specific, leading to a non-separable assignment problem that is generally not solvable using simple ordering-based policies. To address this, we use a sentence-BERT (SBERT)-based surrogate model that predicts semantic fidelity from the sentence embedding and sub-band SNR. We propose an importance-aware scheduler that assigns sentences to sub- bands based on their semantic contribution using an oracle utility function that captures importance-weighted semantic similarity across sentence-sub-band pairs. A neural scheduler is then trained through imitation learning to approximate the oracle policy at more than 200x lower runtime than full DeepSC- based oracle evaluation. Integrated with a deep-learning-enabled semantic communication (DeepSC) system, the proposed method consistently outperforms all benchmark schemes and approaches oracle-level performance under realistic THz channel conditions.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD

CoJEPA: Combining Contrastive Learning and JEPA for Global-Local Music Representations

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has shown strong performance in learning rich representations through self-supervised prediction in latent space. However, it typically relies on teacher–student architecture with an EMA to stabilise training, and can tend to yield uninformative representations. Contrastive learning is stable to train and produces strong global representations, but remains limited on local tasks by the global nature of its objective. In this work, we combine both into CoJEPA: a single shared backbone jointly trained with a JEPA objective on masked sequence tokens and a contrastive objective on the class token. The contrastive gradient provides stability, removing the need for an EMA teacher entirely, while JEPA enriches the sequence tokens via local predictions that contrastive learning alone cannot provide. Crucially, no extra parameters are added to the backbone: the same model is guided towards richer representations purely through the design of its training signal. CoJEPA takes the best of both worlds, outperforming or matching both individual methods across global and local MIR tasks, with a particularly strong advantage on tonal and harmonic understanding, and without any task-specific architectural changes. CoJEPA shows that combining objectives with complementary inductive biases can substitute for scale, encouraging future work to invest in smarter training objectives over ever-larger models.
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Signal Processing

SCI-D$^2$NN: An Optimization Framework for OAM-Multiplexed FSO Communications

Orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing can increase the capacity of free-space optical (FSO) communications, but its detection performance is strongly affected by impairments such as atmospheric turbulence, transmitter pointing errors, and photodetection noise. The diffractive deep neural network (D$^2$NN) can be used as an all-optical front end to mitigate turbulence-induced distortions before detection. However, existing D$^2$NN compensation schemes are not specifically optimized for communication detection. In this paper, we propose a supervised contrastive inspired D$^2$NN (SCI-D$^2$NN) framework for improving the detection performance of OAM-multiplexed FSO communications under these impairments. The proposed framework introduces two training branches: a projection branch that maps the optical field to low-dimensional decision domain samples, and a label branch that provides supervised labels to impose a separation constraint among decision domain samples. In addition, we characterize complex-amplitude crosstalk to obtain the receiver observation vector and formulate two detection schemes, namely single-port profile-likelihood detection and joint maximum-likelihood (ML) detection. We further design two SCI-D$^2$NN training losses called Bhattacharyya distance (BD) based loss and the ML based loss to improve decision domain separability and mitigate detection-performance degradation. Numerical results show that SCI-D$^2$NN achieves more than a 3-dB improvement in bit error rate (BER) over the conventional D$^2$NN baseline in most transmit-power regions. The BD based loss gives the lowest BER under different system parameters and provides more than a 10-dB BER improvement over the baseline in the high transmit power region.
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All authors Rui Deng, Renzhi Yuan, Xinyi Chu, Siming Wang, Chengzhi Liu, Zehao He, Haifeng Yao, Mugen Peng

Signal Processing

Intrinsic Scatterer Representation for Forward Scattering Modeling of Complex Radar Targets

Forward modeling of scattering centers of radar targets is critical for advanced information retrieval of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. Existing forward modeling approaches rely on meshing the target and computing scattering via ray-tracing techniques, which not only incur high computational cost but also discard the semantic information of target geometry, thereby limiting the interpretability of SAR imagery. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel forward scattering modeling framework that directly constructs stable, compact, and physically meaningful scatterers from target geometry. This formulation decouples target representation from specific observation configurations, enabling an intrinsic scatterer description across varying viewing angles. Specifically, an improved Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) scheme is first developed to robustly extract planes, cylinders, and spheres from target point clouds, yielding single-bounce scatterers. Potential multiple-bounce scatterers are then automatically detected by analyzing inter-primitive relations, and further refined through geometric clipping and parameter alignment to produce unique scattering representations compatible with canonical scattering center models. Finally, radar responses and SAR images can be generated under arbitrary observation configurations based on the constructed scatterers. The proposed method is validated through extensive experiments, including comparisons with electromagnetic simulations and measured data. The results show that it can accurately characterize the scattering behaviors of complex targets, providing an efficient, interpretable, and reliable solution for SAR image modeling and understanding.
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Signal Processing

Measurement of Liquid Water Content in Snow from Density-Insensitive Microwave Attenuation

A measurement principle for determining liquid water content (LWC) in snow is presented that does not require a priori knowledge or separate measurement of snow density. LWC affects the imaginary part of the effective permittivity of snow, which is linked to microwave attenuation along a microstrip transmission line embedded in the snowpack, independent of snow density. By analyzing the attenuation over a range of microwave frequencies, the corresponding LWC can be inferred. Full-wave simulations indicate a sensitivity of approximately 2 dB per % LWC,while experimental results confirm the insensitivity to snow density, highlighting the potential for remote snow characterization.
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All authors Marco Niederberger, Sebastian Droz, Shaarujan Kamalanathan, Michel A. Nyffenegger, Albert Loichinger, Hans-Dieter Lang

Signal Processing

Channel Gains to Captions: Task-Unified Multi-Level RF Sensing with Vision-Language Models

This letter investigates a task-unified multi-level radio-frequency (RF) sensing framework driven by vision-language models (VLMs). Existing RF sensing methods rely on task-specific designs and provide only partial environmental information, limiting their ability to handle emerging 6G applications. To address this, we propose a generative formulation for RF sensing, where millimeter-wave (mmWave)/terahertz (THz) channel gains are mapped to captions describing multi-level environmental semantics. The framework solves this problem through a complementary design for RF-environment semantic bridging, where a VLM is fine-tuned to leverage its multimodal representations and prompt-conditioned semantic generation capabilities. Hence, different sensing tasks are specified through textual prompts, enabling the framework to handle diverse tasks in a unified manner. For fine-tuning, we introduce prompt-routed low-rank adaptation (LoRA) experts to achieve level-aware adaptation. Simulation results show that, compared with baselines, our framework achieves superior performance with a broader semantic scope, and enables task-unified sensing beyond predefined tasks. Under an unseen sensing requirement, it achieves an average F1-score improvement of 0.17 over the most competitive variant.
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All authors Tianyu Hu, Zhiren Gong, Haowei Cui, Shuai Wang, Samson Lasaulce, Lingxiang Li, Wassim Hamidouche, Zhi Chen, Merouane Debbah

Signal Processing

Explainable deformable matched filtering reveals measurable departures from classical receiver theory in optical wireless communications

Matched filtering is a central result of communication theory, providing the optimal linear receiver when the received waveform satisfies specific assumptions. Practical communication systems rarely satisfy these assumptions, yet learned receivers that outperform the classical matched filter provide little insight into what those improvements reveal about the limitations of the underlying theory. Here we introduce an explainable deformable matched-filter framework in which machine learning is constrained to learn a low-dimensional deformation of the classical matched filter rather than replacing it. Because every learned correction is defined relative to the theoretical matched-filter solution, the deformation becomes a measurable representation of receiver mismatch rather than an unconstrained optimisation. The communication waveform remains processed entirely by the matched filter, while a Kolmogorov-Arnold Network predicts only the deformation from physically interpretable receiver-state descriptors. Using an optical wireless communication testbed spanning ten signalling formats, four impairment classes and 1,600 conditions, we show that learned deformations improve receiver performance, yielding a median relative error-vector-magnitude reduction of 18.1%, while revealing departures from classical matched-filter optimality. Different signalling families occupy distinct deformation regimes, spectral analysis identifies the physical mechanisms underlying receiver mismatch, and latent receiver-state organisation demonstrates that these departures are structured rather than arbitrary.
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Signal Processing

Doppler Effect in High-Mobility Free Space Optical Links with Multicarrier Intensity Modulation

In this paper, we investigate the impact of Doppler-induced time scaling in intensity-modulation/direct-detection (IM/DD) multicarrier free-space optical links subject to high mobility. Modeling the Doppler effect as a single-sideband frequency shift applied to the analytic signal waveform, we show that it produces a baseband-equivalent phase rotation, resulting in a common-phase error (CPE), in addition to Dirichlet-kernel inter-carrier interference (ICI), even though the optical carrier phase is removed through photo-detection. The numerical results based on DC-biased optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM), show that at small Doppler shifts, the CPE component dominates and can be effectively compensated through pilot-aided phase tracking, while the induced ICI remains rather negligible. At larger Doppler shifts, however, ICI becomes dominant and results in a bit-error-rate floor, highlighting the need for both CPE tracking and ICI mitigation. This is particularly relevant for optical links with small subcarrier spacing and large Doppler shifts, such as those in low-Earth-orbit satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite transmission scenarios.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from physics.app-ph

Bounds on Shaping Partially Coherent Microwaves with Programmable Scattering Systems

We derive bounds on manipulating partially coherent microwaves with programmable scattering systems. We first consider the concentration of power from a partially coherent input into a single output port and derive a prototype-aware bound by combining multiport network theory (MNT) with semidefinite relaxation (SDR). We then address general coherency-matrix synthesis, deriving architecture-independent bounds on fidelity and useful strength, prototype-specific scalar refinements thereof, and fully prototype-aware SDR bounds on the useful-strength–fidelity Pareto frontier. The prototype-aware formulations account for mutual coupling, loss, discrete tunability, and static scattering. We evaluate the bounds on four experimental RIS-parametrized MIMO systems with up to 100 1-bit-programmable elements, using proxy-MNT models estimated from measurements. The resulting bounds are generally tight compared with feasible discrete-optimization outcomes. Interestingly, for coherency synthesis, the simpler bounds can in some cases be tighter than the fully prototype-aware bounds, highlighting their complementarity. Our results provide certified limits for wave-domain processing and harvesting of partially coherent microwaves.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

On Diagonalizable Delay-Doppler Channels and Their Diagonalizing Waveforms

In doubly selective channels, the joint delay and Doppler dispersion generally induces coupling among transmitted symbols, thereby increasing receiver equalization complexity. Nevertheless, by using appropriately designed waveforms, channels with certain delay-Doppler (DD) supports can be diagonalized for one-tap equalization. The whole picture of such DD supports and their corresponding waveforms is still unclear, except for several examples identified in literature. In this paper, under cyclic-prefix (CP)-based block transmission and assuming that the modulation waveforms form an orthonormal basis, we identify all such channel supports by an elementary expression, and derive the corresponding waveforms in closed form.
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Signal Processing

Event-Inference Reliability for Physical AI over Wireless Networks

Wireless-enabled physical artificial intelligence (physical AI) systems call for a shift from reliable data delivery to reliable inference of physical events. The relevant question is not only whether packets arrive, but whether the set of cues available at the decision node, i.e., the evidence, is sufficiently timely and informative to support reliable inference about the event. Accordingly, this paper develops a framework in which event-inference reliability (EIR) is determined jointly by cue informativeness, cue availability, and temporal admissibility. The latter is determined by the downstream task requirement and represented through the usefulness horizon. We define event-inference error ratio (EIER) as the normalised residual event uncertainty after incorporating admitted cues, and EIR as the corresponding normalised uncertainty reduction, both conditioned on decision-node context. We further distinguish the evidence-limited Bayes benchmark from operational performance of a particular inference engine and derive an entropy-based lower bound on the minimum achievable event error from the same decision-node information. The framework then enables an event-aware wireless design interface for cue prioritisation, cue-reliability allocation, and event-inference coverage characterisation. A multiclass indoor activity-inference study combining empirical cue likelihoods with wireless delivery instantiates the framework and demonstrates how it characterises EIR under finite usefulness horizons.
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Signal Processing

Energy Efficiency in Microwave Linear Analog Computer (MiLAC)-Enabled Communications

Microwave linear analog computers (MiLACs) have emerged as a promising architecture for energy-efficient wireless communications by shifting signal processing from the digital to the analog domain using tunable impedance networks. Several MiLAC architectures have recently been proposed, including the single-layer MiLAC (SLM), two-layer MiLAC (TLM), and hybrid digital-MiLAC (HDM). In this paper, we investigate the energy efficiency (EE) of these architectures. Specifically, we formulate EE maximization problems for the SLM, TLM, and HDM architectures under transmit power, user rate, and architecture-specific constraints, and develop a dimensionality reduction technique with successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithms to efficiently solve the resulting non-convex problems. We further derive a computationally efficient solution for EE maximization based on a search over only $(K+1)$ closed-form candidate solutions, where $K$ is the number of users, and analyze the asymptotic EE in the large-antenna regime under negligible quantization noise. Our analysis shows that the EE of the SLM, TLM, and HDM architectures scales as $\ln(N)/N^2$, whereas conventional digital beamforming (DBF) scales as $\ln(N)/N$, where $N$ denotes the number of transmit antennas. Despite these different scaling laws, the faster EE decay of MiLAC-based architectures becomes relevant only at very large antenna dimensions, typically involving thousands of antennas, while they maintain superior EE over practically relevant finite antenna regimes. Finally, we derive an approximation of the number of antennas required to achieve the maximum EE for each architecture and the corresponding EE. Simulation results show that, over practically relevant antenna regimes, MiLAC-based architectures achieve substantially higher EE than conventional fully digital and hybrid analog-digital beamforming.
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