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Wednesday 2 September

Signal Processing

A Dry-Contact Ear-EEG System With Continuous Electrode-Skin Impedance Mismatch Monitoring for Motion Artifact Cancellation Using DRL Stimulus

Dry-contact ear-electroencephalography (Ear-EEG) enables wearable neural monitoring. However, motion induced electrode-skin impedance (ESI) mismatches between electrodes can severely degrade signal quality. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first proof-of-concept dry-contact EarEEG system that uses a driven-right-leg (DRL) stimulus for continuous ESI mismatch monitoring, enabling online adaptive motion artifact cancellation. A 1 kHz sinusoidal stimulus is injected through the DRL electrode. The resulting response to the injected carrier is separated from the EEG using bandpass filtering and demodulation, and then used to extract the ESI mismatch information as the reference input for a normalized least-mean-square adaptive filter followed by a Hampel filtering stage. To evaluate artifact suppression and preservation of neural activity, alpha-band EEG activity was analyzed involving four healthy participants performing head nodding, electrode tapping, and jaw clenching. The system achieved artifact power reductions of 6.5, 12.6, and 9.0 dB (77.6%, 92.8%, and 86.4%, respectively) while alpha-band modulation remained clearly observable after processing. This demonstrates the feasibility of DRL-stimulusbased ESI mismatch monitoring for motion artifact cancellation in wearable dry-contact Ear-EEG.
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All authors Lohan Atapattu, Sajitha Madugalle, Imasha Nethmal, Erandee Jayathilaka, Avishka Herath, Kithmin Wickremasinghe, Simon L. Kappel, Nilan Udayanga, Chamira U. S. Edussooriya

Signal Processing

ARFT: A Synchronized Multimodal RF-Acoustic Dataset for Positioning in Distributed Environments

This paper documents the acoustic-radio fusion in Techtile (ARFT) dataset, a synchronized measurement campaign for distributed wireless sensing and positioning in the Techtile testbed. Ultrasonic and radio frequency (RF) signals are simultaneously transmitted and captured at multiple positions in a 2D spatial grid inside the Techtile testbed. Each acquisition cycle corresponds to one rover stop, one position sample, one acoustic recording and one RF snapshot. The RF modality is recorded as per-host pilot measurements and released as channel state information (CSI) tensors for 42 antennas mounted at the ceiling of the room. The acoustic chirp is recorded with 91 synchronized microphones and transmitted by a synchronized quasi omni-directional speaker. The campaign spans 5011 spatial position samples spanning a 5.57 m by 2.89 m area with complete RF and acoustic data. We detail how the measurements are recorded, quantify per-experiment coverage, describe the RF and acoustic data contents, and explain how the aligned modalities support RF-only, acoustic-only, and joint positioning workflows. Furthermore, a static acoustic positioning pipeline that performs anchor selection, pulse-compression ranging, and least squares (LS) localization is elaborated.
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All authors Daan Delabie, Jarne Van Mulders, Bert Pyck, Gustav Nilsson Gisleskog, Gilles Callebaut

Signal Processing

Active Inference for Joint Port Selection and Pilot Allocation in Fluid Antenna Systems Under Partial CSI

Fluid antenna systems (FAS) obtain spatial degrees of freedom by activating a few radiating ports from a dense grid of candidates, but deciding which ports to activate presupposes channel knowledge at ports that are never measured. Prior port-selection work assumes full or near-full channel state information (CSI) and treats the pilot overhead as a fixed cost. We instead formulate port selection and pilot allocation jointly as active inference. A spatio-temporal generative model – sub-wavelength spatial correlation together with an order-p autoregressive temporal prior – maintains a Gaussian belief over all N port channels, and the transmitter chooses both the ports it serves and the subset of them it pilots by minimizing an expected free energy that trades achievable rate against information gain and port-switching cost. Selection is greedy and submodular, at O(NM) per slot. On a 441-port grid with a hybrid front end at n_RF = 2K, the agent attains 91% of a full-CSI genie's sum rate while measuring only 2.3% of the candidate ports; pilots can then be withdrawn from ports that are still served, one fifth of them for 2% of the sum rate and two fifths for 8%. No training is required.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from eess.SY

Multivariable Geometric Laplace Transform and Fault Detection in Distributed-Converter Lines

Monitoring a DC line with many distributed power converters is a genuinely spatio-temporal problem: the information about a localized fault travels along the whole conductor and reaches a few measurement points mixed with the dynamics of the line itself. This paper develops a two-dimensional geometric Laplace transform (t,x) -> (s_t,s_x) over a commutative subalgebra of the geometric algebra Cl(4,0), isomorphic to Segre's bicomplex numbers, in which two bivectors B_t and B_x act as independent imaginary units for the temporal and the spatial phase. Because the two phases live in algebraically distinguishable planes, a fault at position x_f leaves a transformed residual that factorizes as F_f(s_t) e^{-s_x x_f}: its temporal nature stays in the first factor and its location can be read as a geometric argument of the second. On this representation we build a transmission-line model of the converter line and its space-time dispersion relation, a distributed control by admittance shaping, including an exact treatment of discrete converter sites (spatial sampling, aliasing, and a per-converter droop realization that is exact on the sub-Nyquist band), and a fault diagnosis chain that detects, localizes and classifies injection-loss, shunt, sensor and local-controller faults, extends to multiple simultaneous faults with automatic order selection, and distinguishes the outage of a plant from a cable defect. As an integral object the transform is known in bicomplex analysis, and with a single independent variable it reduces to the complex Laplace transform; the contribution lies in its geometric embedding and in its operational use for fault diagnosis in distributed-converter networks. All results are reproduced by an accompanying open implementation.
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All authors Francisco Manuel Arrabal-Campos, Francisco G. Montoya, Santiago Sánchez-Acevedo, Raymundo E. Torres-Olguin, Alfredo Alcayde

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from math.OC

A simple derivation of the Kalman filter

In this lecture note, we present a concise and self-contained derivation of the discrete-time Kalman filter equations that requires only a basic understanding of least squares estimation. The treatment is designed to minimize mathematical overhead while preserving both rigor and generality.
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Signal Processing

Enhancing Vehicular Network Performance Through Integrated RSU and UAV Deployment

The increasing density of connected vehicles can place substantial pressure on fixed roadside infrastructure, particularly when the available communication resources become insufficient to accommodate temporary traffic surges. This paper investigates auxiliary unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) assistance as a flexible mechanism for improving service availability and throughput in vehicular networks. Two representative network configurations are considered. In the first, an auxiliary UAV (UAVa) supplements two fixed roadside units (RSUs), whereas in the second, UAVa assists a heterogeneous infrastructure comprising one RSU and one UAV. Vehicle service is determined according to node coverage, the line-of-sight (LoS) probability of aerial links, and a prescribed signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirement. The resulting framework enables UAVa to accommodate eligible vehicles that cannot be adequately served by the primary infrastructure as the network load increases. Simulation results show that, under the considered configurations, the aerial nodes benefit from more favorable propagation conditions and achieve higher throughput than the fixed terrestrial RSU. Moreover, the introduction of UAVa increases the available service capacity under high vehicular loads, both for a purely terrestrial baseline and for a network already supported by an aerial node. These results demonstrate the potential of auxiliary UAV assistance as a flexible load-relief mechanism for capacity-constrained vehicular networks.
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All authors Muhammad Ismail, Syed Luqman Shah, Fazal Muhammad, Zeeshan Shafiq

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from stat.ML

From topology learning to graph generation: A unifying perspective

Learning graph structures from data is a fundamental problem that spans a wide range of signal processing and machine learning tasks. While significant effort has been made to tackle the problem, existing research has largely evolved along two parallel directions. The first seeks to infer the topology of an individual graph from observations supported on it, whereas the second seeks to learn a generative distribution from observed graph instances, enabling the sampling of new graphs. This review presents a unified framework that connects these formulations by viewing them as inverse problems of a common generation process for graph data. We review the major methodologies within this framework, highlight their relationships, strengths, and limitations, and identify opportunities for integrating ideas across paradigms. By bridging graph topology learning and graph generation, this review provides a broader cross-disciplinary perspective on the field and outlines promising directions for future research.
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All authors Xiaowen Dong, Hoi-To Wai, Siheng Chen, Laura Toni, Dorina Thanou

Signal Processing

Bidirectional CFO Separation for Radial Velocity Estimation In 5G NR TDD V2X Links

High-accuracy velocity estimation over orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) links is challenging because Doppler shifts and local oscillator (LO) drift contribute the same way to the observed carrier frequency offset (CFO). We propose a bidirectional CFO separation method for a frequency range-1 (FR1) time division duplex (TDD) Uu link between a roadside gNB/TRP and a vehicle user equipment (UE). Downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) CFO estimates are obtained from the physical downlink and uplink shared channel phase tracking reference signals (PT-RS), respectively, their sum isolates the radial Doppler and allow for the extraction of the radial velocity, while their difference recovers the relative LO offset. The estimates are obtained in closed form, without any iterative processing, using only a compact scalar CFO report fed back on the UL, the method can be co-scheduled with an new radio (NR) round trip time (RTT) positioning event to enable simultaneous ranging measurements along velocity estimates. We derive an idealized Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB), show that a linear phase slope estimator attains it at high signal to noise ratio, evaluate sensitivity to angle of arrival uncertainty and multipath, and discuss RF chain mismatch. The resulting link level implementation is aligned with NR PDSCH/PUSCH PT-RS procedures and is suitable for network assisted vehicle to everything (V2X) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC).
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Signal Processing

A Geometric Analysis of Initialization Bias in Spherical $K$-means in the Weak Signal Regime

We study initialization bias in spherical $K$-means for weakly informative directional mixtures. We model the observations by a $K$-component von Mises-Fisher mixture with a small concentration parameter $\kappa$, corresponding to a high-dispersion regime in which the data provide limited information about the underlying directions. Our analysis begins with the limiting case $\kappa=0$ (corresponding to a uniform distribution over the sphere), where one population spherical $K$-means update is governed entirely by the Voronoi tessellation induced by the initialized templates. For uniformly random initializations in fixed dimension $d$, the updated templates become asymptotically aligned with their initial values as $K\to\infty$: the average squared geodesic error scales as $O(K^{-2/(d-1)})$, while the worst-case error is $O((\log K/K)^{2/(d-1)})$. We then show that, in the weak-signal regime of small positive $\kappa$, the population update remains an $O(\kappa)$ perturbation of this limiting map. Thus, in the weak-signal regime, spherical $K$-means can preserve initialization-induced structure despite the presence of a genuine but highly dispersed directional signal.
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Signal Processing

A Survey of Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network,Research Directions, and Open Challenges

The Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) represents a transformative paradigm that redefines the construction, operation, and governance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure in the Web 3.0 era. DePIN integrates physical resources, such as networking equipment, storage, and computing power, with decentralized digital governance, forming a self-incentivized ecosystem that is collaboratively built, shared, and governed by the community. It provides a foundational framework for future communication networks, facilitating decentralized edge intelligence, efficient resource sharing, and trustworthy coordination among heterogeneous devices. Focusing on the feasibility of this emerging paradigm, this paper examines the technology landscape in the pre-DePIN era and gaps between existing methodologies and the forthcoming decentralized infrastructure for Web 3.0. It provides a systematic and comprehensive survey of the background, core characteristics, technical architecture, and applications of DePIN across various vertical domains. The paper analyzes the DePIN technology stack from six layers: physical infrastructure, blockchain, interaction, trust, incentive, and application, with special attention to their cross-layer feedback loops, implementation readiness, and deployment limitations. To further bridge conceptual analysis and practical deployment, we propose a DePIN feasibility assessment framework covering technical, governance, and economic dimensions. Moreover, we highlight promising research directions, providing insights and guidance for further exploration and deployment of DePIN.
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All authors Ming Jiang, Erwu Liu, Xinyu Qu, Wei Ni, Zhongxiang Wei, Ekram Hossain

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Instance Optimal Sparse Recovery from Nonlinear Observations: A Unified Framework

This paper develops a unified framework for instance optimal sparse recovery from nonlinear observations. The main ingredient is a signal-dependent restricted approximate invertibility condition (RAIC) of some gradient, which leads to the instance optimality of iterative hard thresholding. Under Gaussian designs, we apply the proposed framework to phaseless, one-bit, and ReLU measurements, which correspond to the problems of sparse phase retrieval, one-bit compressed sensing, and sparse ReLU regression, respectively. For sparse phase retrieval, we propose a variant of thresholded amplitude flow and show its instance optimality under $O(s^3)$ measurements (up to logarithmic factors), where $s$ is the sparsity level. To our best knowledge, this is the first instance optimal efficient algorithm for sparse phase retrieval and complements Gao, Wang and Xu (2016) that achieved this via a computationally intractable program. In one-bit compressed sensing, we establish the instance optimality of normalized binary iterative hard thresholding and strengthen the recent result of Matsumoto and Mazumdar (2024). In sparse ReLU regression, it is shown that a slight variant of the algorithm in Soltanolkotabi (2017) is instance optimal. Moreover, $(\ell_2,\ell_2)$ non-uniform instance optimal guarantees are obtained for these problems. The analysis is built upon a number of high-dimensional concentration bounds, including bounds on restricted eigenvalues and a novel instance-dependent hyperplane tessellation result.
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Signal Processing

Pinching-Antenna Systems-enabled Secure ISAC: A Two-Timescale Optimization Framework

A novel two-timescale optimization framework is proposed for pinching-antenna systems (PASS)-enabled secure integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). Specifically, a base station (BS) equipped with pinching antennas (PAs) transmits signals to a legitimate user under the existence of an eavesdropper (Eve), while employing leaky coaxial cables (LCXs) for receiving echo signals to track Eve's mobility states, i.e., locations and velocities. Considering the practical PAs activation overhead, the pinching beamforming and baseband processing are optimized in the large and small timescales, respectively. The multiple-waveguide scenario is first considered, where the BS can transmit the artificial noise together with communication signals for both jamming and sensing purposes. A joint baseband and pinching beamforming design problem is formulated to maximize the average secrecy rate. To address this problem, an alternating optimization algorithm is first invoked for jointly optimizing the pinching and baseband beamforming with predicted Eve's mobility states. With determined PAs positions, the baseband beamforming is updated with refined Eve's states obtained from real-time echo signal processing. The single-waveguide scenario is then considered. Since a single waveguide carries at most one independent data stream, an ISAC framework with separate communication and sensing phases is proposed. The element-wise algorithm proposed for the multiple-waveguide scenario is extended to solve the resultant pinching beamforming problem. Numerical results demonstrate that: 1) Eve's velocities and positions can be accurately tracked with the proposed two-timescale framework in both multiple- and single-waveguide scenarios; and 2) PASS achieves superior secrecy rate compared to conventional multiple-antenna benchmarks.
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All authors Haowen Song, Jingjing Zhao, Xidong Mu, Kaiquan Cai

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG

A Unified Particle Filter LSTM for Data-Driven Process Simulation

Data-driven process simulation aims to generate realistic case trajectories from historical event logs without requiring an explicitly specified model of the underlying dynamics. Deep sequence models can capture complex temporal dependencies through next-activity probabilities and conditional time distributions. However, event logs provide only a partial view of the underlying process state, often recording activity completions without the corresponding service-start times. Consequently, the same observed process history may be consistent with multiple plausible latent process conditions, whereas standard recurrent models compress each process prefix into a single deterministic recurrent state. We propose a Unified Particle Filter LSTM (Unified PF-LSTM) that maintains and sequentially updates a weighted set of recurrent-state hypotheses. We summarize this particle belief using its weighted mean and learned features based on the moment-generating function. The resulting representation is used to predict a categorical distribution over the next activity and conditional quantiles of the current activity's sojourn time. The framework is trained end-to-end from event-log data and evaluated on three real-world emergency department datasets. The results show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms the considered data-driven baselines in reproducing routing, duration, and system-level behavior across all datasets, with particularly strong gains in settings where complex process dynamics are only partially reflected in the available event logs.
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Tuesday 1 September

Signal Processing

An Implant-to-Wearable IR-UWB Transmitter-Receiver Architecture and Layered Protocol for High-Density Brain-Computer Interfaces

High-rate neural telemetry requires an implant-towearable link whose circuit partition, waveform mapping, packet processing, and failure semantics are mutually consistent. This paper specifies a chip-oriented, one-way impulse-radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) uplink comprising an implanted packet engine and free-running transmitter, a tissue-proxy channel, and a wearable mixed-signal receiver and digital baseband.
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Signal Processing

Denoising Rather Than Gap Filling: Missing-Data Handling in Sparse Outdoor BLE Positioning

Received signal strength indicator (RSSI) positioning outdoors has one to two orders of magnitude fewer anchors than the indoor systems its methods come from. In the ten-day cattle-tracking deployment reported here, four gateways cover $4{,}302\,\mathrm{m}^2$, or $0.93$ anchors per $1000\,\mathrm{m}^2$. An animal is heard by $0.99$ gateways per second on average, so the observation vector for a given second is almost never complete. How the gaps are filled is therefore a first-order design choice, not a preprocessing detail. Filling at all is worth $8.1\,\mathrm{m}$, $96\%$ of the improvement the hold-length setting can deliver and a $29\%$ error reduction. How long a value is then held is worth the remaining $4\%$, from four seconds to unbounded. Once a value is available, the gain comes from removing noise rather than rebuilding the lost sample: a filtered channel estimate improves on a held raw sample, whereas filling backwards from future samples makes it worse. As that mechanism predicts, smoothing strength has a real interior optimum that is costly to miss in either direction. A smoother allowed to read the future gains only $0.55\,\mathrm{m}$, one fifteenth of what filling is worth, which bounds what any offline method can add. Three method families do not apply here for structural reasons rather than poor performance: two or more of the four channels are live in only $25\%$ of seconds, so the cross-channel structure generative imputation must learn is largely unobserved.
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All authors Yu Sun, Zhiyi Zhu, Patrick Finnerty, Takenao Ohkawa, Kenji Oyama, Chikara Ohta

Signal Processing

Toward Security-Resilient Cell-Free Massive MIMO: A Multi-Stage Framework

This paper develops a robust security-resilient transmission framework for cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (CF-mMIMO) systems under active pilot spoofing attacks. As a baseline, system performance is characterized under attack-free conditions to establish the target user's pre-attack service level. Upon attack detection, the system enters an absorption phase, during which, power allocation is adaptively adjusted across a limited subset of access points (APs) using contaminated channel state information (CSI). This phase quickly compensates for performance degradation while maintaining low operational overhead. Once the secrecy spectral efficiency (SSE) recovers to a prescribed loss level, the resulting power allocation initializes the restoration phase. Here, the transmit powers of all APs are jointly optimized, and a protective partial zero-forcing (PPZF) strategy further improves secrecy. In parallel, artificial noise (AN) is incorporated under a worst-case eavesdropping scenario accounting for large-scale fading uncertainty. The resulting stage-dependent non-convex problems are formulated within a unified framework and solved using successive convex approximation (SCA). Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves an effective time-quality tradeoff while maintaining the highest recovered secrecy; in a representative setup, it achieves gains of up to 3.6%, 15.7%, and 56% over the respective baseline schemes, with similar improvements under eavesdropper's channel uncertainty.
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All authors Junbin Yu, Tianyu Lu, Mohammadali Mohammadi, Michail Matthaiou

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from q-bio.NC

Slow-Fast Brain-Computer Interfaces: Preventing Neuroadaptive Overfitting in AI-Mediated Neural Interfaces

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) from task-specific neural decoders into adaptive systems that complete language, smooth movement, regulate rehabilitation support and adjust stimulation. These capabilities can increase speed, fluency, usability and clinical reach, yet conventional performance metrics may overlook losses in intent fidelity, authorship, agency, therapeutic challenge and durable clinical benefit. I define neuroadaptive overfitting as a closed-loop failure mode in which an AI-mediated BCI becomes over-optimized to short-term proxies of success, including reduced effort, rapid acceptance, lower workload or smooth task completion, while drifting from the user's durable goals. I then propose Slow-Fast BCI, a framework for pacing AI assistance according to decoder evidence, uncertainty, contextual and clinical stakes, fatigue, and user- or clinician-defined goals. The framework distinguishes fast assistance when intent is clear and stakes are low, guarded assistance under uncertainty and slow assistance when misalignment could compromise safety, agency, authorship, motor learning or therapeutic value. Across communication, motor-control, neurorehabilitation and closed-loop neuromodulation applications, I outline corresponding safeguards and evaluation measures. This Perspective argues that AI-mediated BCIs should be evaluated not only by decoding accuracy and task performance, but also by how AI assistance is deployed: when systems act autonomously, seek confirmation, preserve user effort or return control to the user.
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Signal Processing

Trajectory Analysis of ECG Motif Dynamics in the Run-up to Sudden Cardiac Arrest

Early warning signatures of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) remain poorly characterised in long-duration ECG. We quantified pre-event changes in ECG morphology using a motif-based trajectory framework. Holter ECGs from 23 patients with annotated SCA were analysed over non-overlapping 10 s windows. Window-level motifs were extracted to quantify trajectories of instability, consistency, dispersion, heterogeneity, and personalised-baseline distance. Each trajectory was normalised to an early baseline using z-scores and aligned to ventricular fibrillation (VF) onset. Abnormal burden was defined as the proportion of windows with z>=3 within a rolling 10-minute window. Median sustained abnormal burden onset occurred 5.8-8.4 h before VF across morphological metrics. Motif dispersion showed the most consistent long-horizon detection, with sustained abnormal burden >=1 h before VF in 100% of patients and >=2 h in 89%. Motif consistency showed the strongest late-stage change, with 70% median abnormal burden in the final 10 min. Peak morphological deviation occurred ~2 h prior to VF. Our label-free framework transforms longitudinal ECG analysis from an event detection approach towards a continuous characterisation of evolving cardiac change, enabling a personalised early warning of SCA, well suited to long-duration wearable ECG monitoring.
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Signal Processing

Signal-Aware Cayley Completion: Choosing Between an Exact and a Lossy Abelian Host

Group-embedding graph signal processing buys exact Fourier analysis either by enlarging the domain until a graph embeds isometrically into an abelian Cayley graph, or by perturbing the graph until it is one. We give a linear-time procedure that chooses between the two, and study the criterion governing the lossy branch. We prove that the perturbation of the Dirichlet form is exactly the signed sum of the edited-edge energies, and is bounded in modulus by their total, into which the combinatorial cost of the completion does not enter. We confirm experimentally that this energy predicts signal fidelity strongly though not strictly monotonically (Spearman rho = -0.79 on an instance where the completion, and hence the cost, is held fixed), while the cost itself carries no information about it. Selecting among completions of identical cost by this energy recovers 61 percent of the available performance gap on the exhaustive range, on a sample too small to establish that the effect persists beyond eight vertices. On real payment data the router takes the exact branch everywhere; on real anti-money-laundering data the completion invariant is a re-encoding of maximum degree and is not distinguishable from it, and the linear-time bound it rivals is shown to have a blind spot on near-complete graphs.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

The Role of Collective Perception and 5G NR-V2X Sidelink in Road Safety

Vehicles and roadside infrastructure are increasingly equipped with sensors capable of perceiving their surroundings. Sharing this information through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications is a key enabler of Day-2 applications and is supported by the ETSI collective perception service (CPS). While CPS is expected to play a fundamental role in future intelligent transportation systems, its operation may significantly increase channel load, posing challenges in terms of radio resource utilization, communication reliability, and information management. This paper reviews the current status of CPS standardization and investigates its impact in dense deployment scenarios where connected vehicles communicate through fifth-generation (5G) New Radio-V2X (NR-V2X) sidelink (SL) communications. The main contribution is a realistic evaluation of communication reliability, latency, channel occupancy, and information usefulness under different object-selection strategies for collective perception messages. The analysis is conducted through a network-level simulation framework integrating empirical object traces derived from real-world datasets, thereby avoiding the limitations of synthetic traffic models. Results show that perception message generation and radio access mechanisms are tightly coupled and should be jointly designed to maximize the benefits of collective perception services.
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All authors Vittorio Todisco, Mattia Andreani, Maria Luisa Merani, Alessandro Bazzi

Signal Processing

Satellite Swarms for Direct-to-Cell Networks: A Distribution-Performance Trade-off Analysis

This work investigates 2D distributed satellite swarm configurations for direct-to-cell (D2C) applications. Unlike previous studies, which primarily considered swarms as deployment alternatives to monolithic arrays, this paper focuses on exploiting the increased spatial resolution enabled by large distributed apertures. Simulation results show that, for the considered scenarios, increasing the level of antenna distribution across satellite platforms enlarges the effective aperture and improves the system sum rate under ideal operating conditions. While gains are moderate for uniformly distributed users, they become particularly pronounced in scenarios including hotspot with high user densities. The results further show that user scheduling strategies do not invalidate the superiority of highly distributed configurations, as these architectures provide a more balanced rate distribution across the coverage area, including hotspot regions. In addition, the paper analyzes several key implementation challenges associated with large distributed swarms, including errors in inter-satellite relative positioning, synchronization impairments, and limited beamforming and user-position update rates. Although within the range of swarm configurations and scenarios considered in this work, performance gains continue to increase with aperture size, these practical constraints may restrict swarm sizes in the medium term. Nevertheless, the observed performance gains strongly motivate further research into scalable synchronization, positioning and data distribution techniques for future large-scale satellite swarms.
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All authors Xavier Artiga, Marius Caus, Ana I. Pérez-Neira, Yerassyl Akhmetkaziyev, Malte Schellmann

Signal Processing

Why Is Cubic-Phase Airy Beamforming Sufficient for Blockage Recovery?

Blockage is a critical challenge for near-field communications, where reliable transmission depends heavily on the line-of-sight (LoS) path and can suffer severe power degradation when that path is obstructed. Near-field Airy beams offer a promising solution for blockage mitigation by forming curved trajectories that guide energy around obstacles, and can be practically generated with phased arrays by imposing a cubic source phase. However, trajectory-based interpretations explain how Airy beams propagate, but not why cubic-phase Airy beamforming is sufficient for blockage recovery or how much received-power gain the cubic term itself contributes. To answer these questions, we identify the blockage-induced phase mismatch relative to conventional near-field focusing and quantify how successive phase orders compensate it. The resulting analysis reveals that the linear and quadratic degrees of freedom, originally used to compensate the free-space geometric phase, can be reoptimized under blockage to provide resteering and refocusing, respectively. The quadratic term can compensate the dominant quadratic component of the additional mismatch, while the Airy cubic provides the first independent correction to the remaining non-quadratic mismatch. Simulations show that linear and quadratic compensation recover most of the available gain. The Airy cubic adds only $0.1433$ dB on average, yet enables the cubic-phase family to attain $99.77\%$ of the phase-only upper bound. Residual-phase analysis further determines when the remaining higher-order components are negligible within a prescribed received-power tolerance. These results explain why cubic-phase Airy beamforming is sufficient: lower-order phase terms provide most of the recovery, while the cubic term closes nearly all of the remaining gap.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Analog-DB: An Agent-First Analog Integrated Circuit Database, From Blocks to Systems

Sharing analog integrated circuit designs remains difficult: foundry non-disclosure agreements restrict the process details a design depends on, and the testbenches behind published results are rarely released. We present analog-db, an open-source, versioned database built on a shareable design representation. A domain-specific language captures each design as a process-neutral topology, reusable testbenches, and a machine-readable datasheet under one schema, so a design is shared in full and re-simulates on the process kits it is bound to. A parameterization scheme exposes functional sub-blocks and device sizes as named parameters that carry their matching constraints, making circuits composable and retargetable; a schema-governed contract and queryable catalog let AI design agents discover and reuse them directly. Across the regulator corpus, all 23 circuit-kit bindings on three open kits meet their own recorded specification bands (typical corner, matched devices, no layout) and 10 of 23 meet a common class band. Seventeen of the 23 imported sizings failed their testbenches and closed under a gm/ID sizing loop driven by the annotated sub-block roles, typically within one to three iterations. In a supervised case study, a coding agent working from the released artifacts sized the op-amp cores of a chopper instrumentation amplifier on an open 130nm kit, locating four hand-entry defects and a missing common-mode feedback loop that the sizing-only baseline did not repair. The database holds 68 circuits across sixteen classes, verifiable at schematic level under a tiered harness and tracked on a power/performance scoreboard, released at https://github.com/MacAnalog/spicexplorer-release.
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Signal Processing

Joint PAPR and OOBE Reduction for AFDM via Chirp Parameter Tuning

This paper addresses the joint reduction of the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and out-of-band emissions (OOBE) in affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) systems by selecting the pre-chirp parameter c2. While existing approaches typically optimize either PAPR or OOBE independently, the proposed method jointly considers both metrics. To this end, a weighted cost function combining PAPR and OOBE is introduced to evaluate the trade-off between the two objectives. A pre-chirp selection scheme, inspired by the selected mapping (SLM) technique, is then employed to identify the optimal c2 value from a finite set of candidates, yielding a Pareto-optimal operating point within a discrete set. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach simultaneously reduces both PAPR and OOBE compared with conventional AFDM. Moreover, its performance remains close to that of methods specifically optimized for a single objective, with only about a 1 dB degradation in PAPR reduction and a 2-3 dB degradation in OOBE suppression.
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All authors Vincent Savaux, Hyeon Seok Rou, Zeping Sui, Giuseppe Thadeu Freitas de Abreu, Zilong Liu

Signal Processing

Freshness-Aware Constrained Sensing-Aided Beam Prediction with Knowledge Distillation

Beam prediction leveraging environmental data reduces over-the-air beam training overhead. Existing frameworks, however, assume continuous access to fresh sensory data, an assumption that breaks down under sensing budget constraints or sensor failures. To make this more practical, this paper proposes a sensing-aided beam prediction framework that operates under an average sensing rate constraint. We incorporate the age of information (AoI) directly into the beam prediction pipeline as a synthetic input modality: the age of the most recently captured data is encoded and fused with visual features through a gating mechanism. This provides the predictor with explicit context information about input sensory data reliability. We formalize and examine three fixed sampling policies, accumulated, uniform, and randomized, under the average sensing budget. We further develop a knowledge distillation (KD) framework that operates as a robustness regularizer rather than a pure model compression method. In particular, the high-capacity teacher is trained unconstrained on fully sampled data, and its representational knowledge is transferred to a compact student deployed under the sensing budget. We conduct numerical experiments on the DeepSense 6G data set. The results show that AoI fusion nearly doubles top-1 accuracy at strict sensing budgets, and age-aware models achieve near-optimal top-3 accuracy with only 20% of the data. Furthermore, we find that the teacher training regime is a more consequential design choice than the distillation loss function.
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All authors Abolfazl Zakeri, Nhan Thanh Nguyen, Ahmed Alkhateeb, Markku Juntti

Signal Processing

How Much Training is Needed with a Digital Twin?

The following paper addresses how much pilot training is needed when a digital twin (DT) of the wireless radio channel is available to aid a wireless communication system with a channel estimation task. The DT of a wireless channel is widely expected to reduce the pilot overhead of channel estimation, following the informal rule that “the more accurate the twin, the fewer pilots are needed.” This trade-off, however, has only ever been demonstrated empirically and never quantified. We close this gap by treating the DT as a complementary measurement of the channel that the receiver fuses with its pilot observations in the physical world. Consequently, fusing the physical and digital worlds through the best linear unbiased estimator, we derive a DT-aided Cramér-Rao bound, and from it a pilot-equivalence law that converts DT fidelity into an equivalent number of training symbols. For a biased twin unknown to the estimator, we obtain the exact mismatch threshold beyond which trusting the DT is worse than ignoring it. We quantify how much training is needed with the DT to attain a desired mean square error on channel estimation. Particular cases are discussed to tell when training in the physical world can be completely bypassed. We finally translate these results into a block-fading achievable rate whose optimal training length is the unique root of a single equation, and identify the DT fidelity above which pilot training can be dispensed with altogether. Extensive numerical results corroborate closed-form expression and reveal that the value of a DT is largest at finite signal-to-noise ratio and vanishes in both the low- and high-SNR limits.
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Signal Processing

32-point DFT Approximations Based on Minimal Frobenius Error and DFT Symmetries

This work introduces low-complexity, multiplierless approximations for the 32-point discrete Fourier transform. The proposed methods are obtained by minimizing the Frobenius error compared against the DFT matrix over a set of trivial multipliers. A row-wise, symmetry-constrained parameterization is employed to reduce the search space size, rendering the task computationally tractable. The resulting approximations could outperform the reference method in the literature according to energy-based error measurements. A sparse matrix factorization is provided for efficient computation; the arithmetic costs are 152 real additions and 34 bit-shifts only.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Generalized Tan-Arlery-Rabaste-Lehmann-Ovarlez Lower Bound on Ambiguity Function of a Set of Sequences With Mismatched Filters

In this paper, a lower bound on the maximum ambiguity function (AF) sidelobes of a set of unimodular sequences is formulated for the desired low-ambiguity-zone (LAZ). Our main idea is to introduce a set of mismatched filters associated to a set of unimodular sequences and two weight vectors for the delay and Doppler shifts, respectively. The length of mismatched filter maybe different to the length of unimodular sequence. The proposed lower bound on the maximum AF sidelobes for the desired LAZ can be treated as an extension of Tan-Arlery-Rabaste-Lehmann-Ovarlez lower bound, published in 2020, which dealt with the conventional correlation of sequences.
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Signal Processing

OTFS Channel Estimation Utilizing Sparse Bayesian Generative Modelling

One of the key challenges of future wireless communication systems is ensuring reliability in high-speed mobile scenarios, where accurate recovery of channel state information (CSI) is essential. Many recent studies have concluded that orthogonal time-frequency space (OTFS) modulation is a promising technology for addressing this challenge. Additionally, machine learning (ML)-based methods have the potential to improve channel estimation performance by leveraging ambient information more effectively than classical estimation techniques. This paper particularly addresses channel estimation for OTFS by employing a compressive sensing (CS)-based sparse Bayesian generative model (SBGM), namely the recently introduced compressive sensing Gaussian mixture model (CSGMM). We show that our proposed approach yields significant improvement in normalized mean squared error (NMSE) over the next-best-performing baseline. We additionally provide insights into the theoretical potential of the model to optimally approximate complex channel distributions with arbitrary precision within the Doppler-delay (DD) domain. To summarize, this work establishes the OTFS-CSGMM framework as a promising solution for high mobility wireless channel estimation.
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All authors Louis Anseaume, Benedikt Böck, Franz Weißer, Wolfgang Utschick

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Space Generative AI with Solar Energy Harvesting

Satellites are emerging as promising platforms to extend generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to remote areas lacking terrestrial infrastructure. However, deploying space generative AI is fundamentally constrained by the limited, time-varying onboard energy supplied by solar energy harvesting (EH). This paper presents a framework for solar-powered space generative AI in which a satellite receives a user prompt, executes a diffusion-based image-generation model, and downlinks the compressed result within a strict time window. We identify the fundamental computation–communication (C$^2$) trade-offs governed by the shared harvested-energy budgets. Specifically, increasing the number of generation steps improves intrinsic image quality but depletes energy and time available for downlink transmission, whereas prioritizing communication guarantees reliable delivery but sacrifices semantic quality. To balance these trade-offs and maximize end-to-end (E2E) generative performance, we exploit the predictable solar-EH dynamics induced by deterministic orbital motion and develop a joint C$^2$ resource-optimization framework using a tractable two-step approach. First, we characterize the maximum downlink throughput for a fixed generation depth under continuous solar EH. This establishes a separation principle that decouples waiting-time selection from optimal transmit-power control. Next, we formulate a joint C$^2$ utility-maximization problem and derive a closed-form, low-complexity step-selection policy in the dominant constant-power regime. Extensive experiments under realistic orbital dynamics demonstrate that the proposed policy dynamically balances generation quality and transmission reliability. This yields significant E2E performance gains over static computation- and communication-centric baselines across diverse solar-EH states.
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All authors Jierui Zhang, Jianhao Huang, Zhanwei Wang, Kaibin Huang