Peer Revenue Publish or profit

Papers

Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science Signal Processing

eess.SP Watch Signal Processing (sign in to use)

Thursday 1 October

Signal Processing

CSI-Free Positioning of Movable Antennas for IoT Networks: A Compositional Kernelized Bandit

Movable antenna (MA) arrays reshape the propagation channel by mechanically changing the element positions, which suits Internet-of-Things access points whose devices cannot adapt on their own. Existing position optimization assumes the channel is known at every candidate configuration. In practice a configuration can be evaluated only after the array has moved there, over several slots limited by the actuator speed, during which the channel changes. We formulate the positioning of M MAs serving K < M devices without channel state information as a nonstationary kernelized bandit over the joint configuration space, driven by a single scalar rate feedback per slot under a reachability constraint and an actuation-energy cost. Since the information gain of a standard kernel grows exponentially with M , and the multiuser sum rate depends on the positions through a sum of per-antenna terms, we design a compositional kernel that retains interactions up to antenna pairs. On this kernel we propose CoMoveUCB, which selects a target configuration over the whole feasible set by coordinate ascent and retains it under a persistence rule. We prove sublinear dynamic regret with a polynomial dependence on M . Simulations show that CoMoveUCB outperforms fixed, measure-then-optimize, and reachability-confined benchmarks across loadings, confirming the value of repositioning an MA array under realistic actuation limits.
Read the full abstract

All authors Wonseok Choi, Yunseob Tae, Jeongjae Lee, Songnam Hong

Signal Processing

Detection-Aware Rate–CRB Characterization for Resource Allocation in ISAC Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) performance analysis commonly employs the Cramér–Rao bound (CRB) as the sensing metric. The CRB lower-bounds estimation-error variance under a target-present model but does not characterize the reliability of the energy detection that receivers often use to validate returns against noise and clutter. Considering the range CRB in a single-user, single-target joint power–bandwidth allocation problem, we establish the conditions under which a rate-optimal allocation at a given CRB requirement fails to achieve a given detection probability. We then develop detection-constrained rate–CRB characterizations at two levels: 1) a detection-aware (DA) formulation that treats the CRB and detection probability as parallel requirements, and 2) a detect–then–estimate (DTE) formulation using a detection-gated CRB defined on frames that cross an energy threshold. We analyze the resulting changes in the optimal rate and feasible power–bandwidth allocations, and for DTE further show how detection probability and conditional estimation accuracy jointly determine downstream tracking performance. Multi-user, multi-target resource allocation is then formulated under CRB-only, DA, and DTE characterizations. The results show that CRB-only allocation can conceal inadequate detection reliability, and that accounting for detection and receiver architecture materially changes the power–bandwidth allocation and the communication–sensing tradeoff.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Doppler-Only Extended Target Tracking in a Distributed Antenna System

In modern radar and Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) systems, the conventional point-scatterer assumption becomes increasingly inaccurate due to higher spatial resolution. In this context, Extended Target Tracking (ETT) has grown interest in recent years. However, most existing ETT works are designed for monostatic systems due to the fine time synchronisation or per-node antenna arrays required for ranging and angle estimation in multistatic scenarios. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel approach to extended target tracking in a distributed antenna system, where only bistatic Doppler frequency measurements are available. Doppler-only tracking is particularly attractive as it avoids the two aforementioned issues. To address this Doppler-only extended target tracking problem, we develop a modified Rao-Blackwellised Particle Filter (RBPF) that replaces the standard Kalman update with a particle-specific Extended Kalman Filter update followed by a relinearisation step, handling the non-linearities of both the rigid extended target dynamics and the observation model. Numerical simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for accurate extended target tracking under this Doppler-only setting.
Read the full abstract

All authors Baptiste Sambon, Gilles Monnoyer, Luc Vandendorpe, Claude Oestges

Signal Processing

Sparse Experimental Design for Nonsmooth Estimators via Bilevel Optimization

Optimal experimental design (OED) decides which measurements to acquire for downstream estimation. Classically, this is done by optimizing an information criterion derived from a linear-Gaussian model, for which the estimator is available in closed form. Many modern estimators such as Lasso, elastic net, or total-variation-based estimators, however, are nonsmooth and lack a closed-form solution. To extend OED to these scenarios, we recast the problem as what it implicitly is: a bilevel program whose lower level computes the deployed nonsmooth estimator and whose upper level scores its validation prediction risk. Rather than fixing the number of measurements in advance, we charge each continuous acquisition weight a concave sparsity price. As a result, how many and which measurements to keep are both outcomes of the optimization. A measurement survives only if its estimator-aware value exceeds its price, and progressively increasing the price yields a sequence of designs that explores the trade-off between measurement cardinality and estimation accuracy. Using a value-function penalty reformulation, we develop a single-loop proximal-gradient algorithm that avoids differentiating the nonsmooth solution map and establish its convergence to an (approximate) stationary point. Experiments on synthetic sparse recovery and image reconstruction demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.AI

CortexBridge: Cortical Alignment of EEG Montages for Foundation Models

Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models are often pretrained with a fixed channel vocabulary or a limited set of montages, making transfer difficult when electrode layouts change. We propose CortexBridge, a lightweight adapter that combines EEG features with electrode and atlas coordinates to map arbitrary montages into a shared cortical latent space. Evaluated with three frozen foundation models on five brain-computer interface (BCI) datasets from the Mother of All BCI Benchmarks (MOABB), CortexBridge improves performance in 13 of 15 evaluations. The gains in balanced accuracy average 0.80% for EEGPT, 0.70% for LaBraM, and 3.26% for CBraMod, with a maximum gain of 13.02% on 12-class steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) classification. Visualizations of the learned atlas representations reveal task-dependent spatial patterns, with SSVEP showing a more concentrated representation in the Yeo Visual network than auditory P300. These results establish cortical alignment as a learnable and anatomically grounded routing mechanism from heterogeneous EEG montages to pretrained foundation models.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jiazhen Hong, Xiaotian Zhou, Zihao Ding, Kailong Wang, Yu Wu

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from physics.optics

Cross-platform frequency-domain physical neural networks with identical models and parameters

Frequency-domain physical neural networks (PNNs) have emerged as a promising analog computing paradigm, achieving a reduced number of devices, enhanced robustness, and high inference accuracy. However, existing demonstrations across various physical domains, such as optics, acoustics, and electronics, are mostly specific to the target devices or platforms, usually requiring hardware-dependent models and post-fabrication parameter tuning. Here, we demonstrate cross-platform implementations of frequency-domain PNN across different wave-based computing platforms using identical, pre-trained parameters. By exploiting shared second-order nonlinear processes, the PNN model is implemented on optical, microwave, and acoustic-wave platforms without the need of fine tuning the parameters. Evaluated on a unified four-class classification task, the frequency-domain PNN achieves high inference accuracies of 97.6% in optics, 98.4% in electronics, and 98.2% in mechanics. Further, we systematically compare related performance metrics across these three distinct physical domains, paving the way to a universal neural network across different physical platforms.
Read the full abstract

All authors Zichen Xi, Jun Ji, Liyang Jin, Hsuan-Hao Lu, Wenjie Xiong, Linbo Shao

Signal Processing

Symmetry and the Form of Nonlinear Behavioral Models: A Tutorial for Microwave Engineers

Behavioral models of nonlinear microwave devices – the Cardiff model, X-parameters, the higher-order describing functions of the mechanical-systems literature – all share a functional form. This tutorial derives that form from time invariance alone. It develops the consequences of that derivation using only the harmonic-balance description of a single-tone periodic steady state, in which each port waveform is a finite set of harmonic phasors, and uses them to give the Cardiff model's three exponents physical interpretations. In the monomial rewriting the magnitude exponent $m$ is the order of the device's load-side nonlinearity; the phase exponent $n$ is set by the drive-side harmonic; and the conjugate index $r$ obeys $r_{\max}=\lfloor K/2\rfloor$, where $K$ is the degree of the load-side nonlinearity. The familiar restriction $r\le1$ is therefore a statement about the device, exact whenever $K\le3$. The final sections show that a tailored A-pull measurement displays this decomposition directly: each spectral cluster's half-width is the order of the nonlinearity that produced it. The tutorial is pedagogical and is meant as a gentler introduction to the results treated in the companion paper "Time invariance, circle symmetry, and the completeness of the Cardiff behavioral model", which states and proves the theorems in full.
Read the full abstract

2610.01031 · 1 Oct · 25 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables. v3: one sentence in the Scope section corrected (multi-harmonic and multi-port cases use the single circle; only incommensurate tones need a torus). v2: prior work attributed; wording revised; results unchanged. Companion to arXiv:2609.35828, arXiv:2609.38771. Toolkit: doi:10.5281/zenodo.22816760

Signal Processing

Correlation Analysis between Terrain Features and eLoran Spatial ASF according to DEM Spatial Resolution

The ASF is a major source of positioning error in eLoran system and is affected by terrain characteristics along the signal propagation path. This study analyzes the correlations between spatial ASF and path-based terrain features using NASA SRTM 30m and NGII 90m DEMs. Path mean elevation and path mean slope were extracted along the propagation paths from the Gwangju eLoran transmitter to measurement locations in the Incheon and Pyeongtaek port areas. The results show that both terrain features are strongly correlated with spatial ASF, with the higher-resolution NASA SRTM DEM generally exhibiting stronger correlations, particularly for path mean slope. These findings demonstrate the importance of DEM spatial resolution in terrain-based spatial ASF analysis and provide a basis for selecting terrain data for future machine-learning-based ASF prediction
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

LEO Doppler Matching from Power Spectrum Data with Continuity-Based Segmentation and Multi-Position Clock Offset Estimation

Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite Doppler measurements extracted from passive software-defined radio (SDR) spectrum data require temporal alignment with predicted satellite trajectories for reliable satellite association. In our previous framework, Doppler slope information was used during both segment generation and clock offset estimation, while the clock offset was estimated at a single coarse receiver position. This study proposes a satellite matching framework based on continuity-based Doppler segmentation and multi-position clock offset estimation to reduce these dependencies. Doppler segments are first generated using only temporal and frequency continuity, thereby separating segment generation from the slope criterion used for clock offset estimation. The clock offset is then estimated using five coarse receiver positions, consisting of one city-level nominal position and four surrounding positions, through a two-stage procedure based on slope compatibility and a combined Doppler cost. The aligned segments are subsequently associated with candidate satellites using a matching score based on the same Doppler slope and bias-removed RMSE metrics, and the resulting associations are evaluated through receiver localization. Experiments using six hours of passive Starlink/OneWeb monitoring data show that continuity-based segmentation alone did not improve receiver localization compared with slope-based segmentation under single-position clock offset estimation. However, applying the proposed multi-position clock offset estimation to the same continuity-based Doppler segments reduced the localization error from 32.99 km to 1.84 km, achieving the lowest error among the evaluated methods. The results for the evaluated dataset show improved spatial consistency of satellite associations when multi-position clock offset estimation is applied to continuity-based Doppler segments.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Lunar Surface Receiver Clock Synchronization Using GNSS and Satellite Nadir Angle

The use of signals from Earth-orbiting Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) constellations for positioning, navigation, and timing on the lunar surface was recently demonstrated by the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) aboard Blue Ghost Mission 1. For receiver clock synchronization using GNSS, Kalman filter performance depends on the satellite-specific measurement uncertainty used to construct the measurement noise covariance. Terrestrial measurement weighting commonly relies on receiver elevation angle, but the elevation angles in the analyzed LuGRE data are confined to 24.2-31.5 degrees, providing limited discrimination of measurement quality. In contrast, satellite nadir angles span 12.1-66.6 degrees, and the measurement variability increases substantially at small nadir angles. Based on this observation, we propose a measurement weighting model that combines satellite nadir angle with C/N0 for lunar surface receiver clock synchronization. The proposed model is evaluated against three weighting methods adopted from the literature using seven LuGRE operation periods (OPs). It achieves the lowest receiver clock bias root mean square error (RMSE) in six of the seven OPs and an overall RMSE of 5.78 m, which is 19.5% lower than that of the best comparison model. The proposed model also provides the lowest clock bias prediction RMSE under simulated measurement outages.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Physics-Guided Bayesian Optimization for High-Dimensional Mixed-Variable MIMO Base Station Design

This paper proposes a physics-guided Bayesian optimization for high-dimensional mixed-variable multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) base station (BS) design. The considered problem jointly selects a subset of candidate sites for BS deployment and optimizes the azimuth angles, downtilt angles, and transmit power spectral densities of the BSs, while each configuration is evaluated using computationally expensive site-specific ray tracing. To efficiently optimize the system configuration, the proposed method constructs a low-cost physics-based proxy from precomputed propagation information. The proxy-estimated communication coverage is used as the Gaussian process (GP) prior mean, and a residual GP with three-dimensional physical features learns the discrepancy between the proxy and full evaluations. Ray-tracing-based evaluations in two urban scenarios show that the proposed method achieves up to approximately 15 percentage points higher coverage than conventional and high-dimensional optimization baselines under the same evaluation budget.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Spatial Thickness Mapping in Heterogeneous Plate Using Wave Physics-Informed Regression

Traditional guided wave methods for structural health monitoring typically assume uniform material properties, which limit their ability to characterize heterogeneous structures with spatially varying thickness, damage, or material properties. These are challenges commonly encountered in corrosion assessment, composite delamination detection, and structural degradation monitoring. This paper presents a wave physics-informed regression approach that enables spatially resolved characterization of material properties by extracting local dispersion curves across a structure. Our approach focuses on a highly interpretable but flexible physics-informed framework that can be solved using fast algorithms and achieve robust numerical solutions. This paper discusses the mathematical design of the framework, the algorithm, and its interpretation. The framework was applied to a guided wave wavefield imaging dataset from a thin aluminum plate with non-uniform thickness around a hole to validate its practicality. The framework creates an accurate thickness map (correlation coefficient 0.94 with x-ray CT validation) as well as extracts the frequency-dependent velocities of waves within those regions.
Read the full abstract

All authors Amanda Beck, Harsha Vardhan Tetali, Michael MacIsaac, Charlie Tran, Woohyun Eum, Ghatu Subhash, Joel B. Harley

Wednesday 30 September

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from eess.AS

EarLog: Opportunistic Ear Physiology Sensing toward Personalized Hearing Risk Awareness

Many headphone users risk irreversible hearing damage during high-load listening, yet current protection still relies on sound-pressure limits. Clinical tests detect damage after it becomes measurable, leaving the risk-accumulating process unobserved. The acoustic reflex (AR), an involuntary response to high acoustic load, marks when the ear enters a protective state. AR traces are weak, and existing measurements require dedicated probes and controlled conditions that are difficult to maintain during everyday audio. We present EarLog, which turns playback, the dominant interference, into an opportunistic probe. EarLog introduces content-conditioned residual sensing to suppress variations caused by nonstationary content, individual ear acoustics, and device response. It identifies weak AR through loudness-dependent changes and localized spectral irregularities in the residual. A resonance-constrained sparse finite impulse response (FIR) model captures the short-window response. Dual-microphone observations, mild-distortion recovery, and cross-session reference updates keep detection usable under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), fit changes, and environmental drift. EarLog runs in real time on an embedded controller using a low-cost dual-microphone add-on. We evaluate it with 81 participants, 16 headphone models, and more than 400 hours of recordings. EarLog achieves 99.0% sensitivity and 98.7% specificity on a clinically referenced benchmark. EarLog records listener-specific AR events during everyday listening, providing data for future longitudinal studies of hearing risk.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

PI-AMFM: Permutation-Invariant Learning for Variable-Cardinality AM-FM Mode Decomposition in Biomedical Signal Analysis

Physiological recordings often contain nonstationary oscillatory components whose number and dynamics vary across signals. Amplitude- and frequency-modulated (AM-FM) representations are well suited to characterizing such dynamics and have shown broad utility in biomedical signal analysis. Recent approaches have incorporated neural networks to learn mode decomposition patterns from data, but component cardinality is often predefined or determined through separate stopping or selection mechanisms. We propose a permutation-invariant neural framework for variable-cardinality AM-FM mode decomposition (PI-AMFM). PI-AMFM combines a multiscale temporal encoder, Mamba backbone, and component-presence estimation, with permutation-invariant Hungarian matching during training. On synthetic AM-FM signals, PI-AMFM achieved lower decomposition, instantaneous-frequency, reconstruction, and mode-count errors than the compared methods while preserving the overall trajectory pattern in a crossing-chirp example. On photoplethysmographic recordings, recovered modes captured cardiac and respiratory dynamics despite training only on synthetic signals. These results support the feasibility of PI-AMFM for variable-cardinality decomposition of nonstationary biomedical signals.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from quant-ph

Real-Time Adaptive Filtering and the Boxcar Limit in Superconducting Qubit Readout

Control and readout systems for superconducting quantum computing support real-time control and high-fidelity qubit-state discrimination. We examine when additional digital processing improves readout fidelity. A common baseline for dispersive readout uses a boxcar averager to compute a uniformly weighted average over a fixed window, followed by threshold-based state assignment. In this paper, we evaluated an adaptive finite-impulse-response (FIR) filter trained in real time using the least-mean-squares (LMS) algorithm on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) quantum controller. We also analyzed measured readout shots offline to compare the frozen filter with boxcar averaging and to evaluate per-sample weighting and sequential detection. For the fixed FIR filters tested, we show summing the filtered samples gives the boxcar sum multiplied by one complex number, apart from a small edge correction. We call this the kernel collapse. The multiplication scales the state separation and noise equally without improving state discrimination, and we call this the boxcar limit. The frozen LMS filter reduces trace noise, but same-shot offline comparisons show no resolved improvement in readout fidelity at the tested operating points. On a 2D transmon, tuning the integration window accounts for much of the observed improvement over full-window integration, highlighting the importance of an optimized boxcar baseline when evaluating per-sample weighting. We then examine how changing the decision method can reduce calibration effort and decision time. On a higher-fidelity 3D ancilla readout, model-based template estimation reaches the same fidelity target as direct averaging with about 30 rather than 300 labeled shots per state. Offline sequential replay assigns most shots before the acquisition window ends, with contrast fidelity within an absolute +/-0.5% tolerance of the boxcar on the primary...
Read the full abstract

All authors Hans Johnson, Tanay Roy, Leonardo Bove, David van Zanten, Silvia Zorzetti, Jafar Saniie

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from eess.AS

MAV-C: A Framework for the Joint Objective Estimation of Audio-Visual Complexity in Immersive Virtual Environments

We present the Motion-Aware Audio-Visual Complexity Metric (MAV-C), a reference-free framework for the joint objective estimation of audio-visual complexity. The metric combines entropy-based audio features (temporal, spectral, and spatial) with visual features (Sobel gradient magnitude, chromatic uniqueness, and optical flow) via a parametric fusion stage, producing a continuous joint complexity score CAV (t) [0,1]. We validate MAV-C on two datasets: a controlled synthetic corpus (SYN) of stimuli with known signal characteristics and a naturalistic gameplay corpus (GAM) of 60 clips drawn from the SAFEPLAY-X dataset. On SYN, the metric exhibits strong validity: the audio score CA and visual score CV are each insensitive to changes in the opposite modality (CoV < 0.003), the joint score CAV spans [0.00,0.90] across all parameter combinations, and single-axis feature sweeps produce monotone trajectories (Spearman up to 0.995). On GAM, CV differs significantly across content categories (Kruskal-Wallis p = 0.021) while CA does not, and the two sub-scores are uncorrelated (r = 0.03), confirming they operate on independent signal dimensions. OFAT sensitivity analysis identifies a two-tier parameter hierarchy, with modality balance (wa) and visual regularization (v) as most significant tunable parameters. Full subjective calibration is planned as future work.
Read the full abstract

All authors Luca Resti, Amelia Gully, Michael McLoughlin, Gavin Kearney, Alena Denisova

Signal Processing

ARCTAN: Arbitrary RF Containment Using Tactical Aerial Networks and Differentiable Ray Tracing

Aerial base stations (ABSs) can rapidly establish connectivity in ad hoc, infrastructure-deprived environments, but their broadcast, line-of-sight transmissions leak far beyond the intended service area, exposing communications to passive eavesdropping and interference. Prior physical layer defenses based on cooperative jamming typically assume known eavesdropper locations, simplified statistical channels, or continuously repositioned jammers. We instead pose the problem as a radio frequency (RF) containment: confining usable signal to a user-defined, arbitrarily-shaped target zone while denying it elsewhere independent of eavesdropper location. We present ARCTAN, a gradient-based optimization framework that jointly optimizes the position, orientation, and transmit power of stationary ABSs and cooperative jammers (CJs) by backpropagating through site-specific, differentiable 3D ray traced channels. Evaluated in a high-fidelity digital twin across three target zone geometries, ARCTAN achieves a mean in-zone SINR of approximately 10 dB while reducing mean out-of-zone SINR from 13-16 dB to -3-5 dB, and suppressing signal-leakage ratios from over 93% to below 46% requiring at most 10 of 12 candidate CJs.
Read the full abstract

All authors Samuel Rivera, Zhihui Gao, Yiming Li, Tingjun Chen

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from eess.AS

Frequency-Weighted Soft-Constrained Spatially Selective Active Noise Control for Open-Fitting Hearables

Recently, soft-constrained spatially selective active noise control (SSANC) for open-fitting hearables has been proposed to enable a flexible trade-off between noise reduction and desired-speech preservation using a scalar trade-off parameter across all frequencies. This paper generalizes soft-constrained SSANC by introducing frequency-dependent weighting of the desired-speech preservation error while maintaining low-delay time-domain active control. Frequency-dependent weightings based on the speech intelligibility index (SII), the modified intermediate reference system (MIRS), the long-term average speech spectrum (LTASS), and a signal-dependent oracle are compared with scalar weighting using measured acoustic impulse responses in a multi-speaker scenario. The results show that LTASS and oracle weightings provide the largest speech-intelligibility improvements and comparable speech-quality improvements at substantially lower distortion levels than those obtained with SII and MIRS weightings. While the oracle weighting provides the best overall perceptual trade-off, LTASS weighting provides a comparable perceptual trade-off without requiring the clean desired-speech signal.
Read the full abstract

All authors Tong Xiao, Reinhild Roden, Matthias Blau, Simon Doclo

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from eess.AS

End-to-End Historical Music Restoration in Latent Space

Historical music restoration (HMR) has almost exclusively focused on constrained problems such as Super-Resolution or the restoration of solo pieces, under-exploring the general task of restoring orchestral historical music, which has multiple instruments. This under-exploration is largely because the HMR domain, early-20th-century recordings, has no pre-degradation ground-truth pairs, making the restoration task unsupervised and more challenging. This paper presents a supervised end-to-end orchestral HMR benchmark by exploring both the synthetic degradation functions and the end-to-end generative deep-learning restoration methods. We simulate the historical recording degradation chain more faithfully than prior work, which makes orchestral restoration into a tractable supervised problem. A latent flow-matching model trained on the resulting synthetic pairs outperforms existing HMR baselines on intrusive, non-intrusive, and subjective evaluations. We also curate and release a 9.3-hour license-free, unpaired, historical classical-music test set, along with code and audio demos.
Read the full abstract

All authors Steven Cho, Junghyun Koo, Raphael Lafargue, Tushar Dhyani, Eloi Moliner, Yuki Mitsufuji

Signal Processing

Mean Spatial Frequency Decoupling for Learning-Based Uplink-to-Downlink Covariance Conversion in FDD Massive MIMO

In frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, the uplink (UL)-to-downlink (DL) channel covariance matrix (CCM) conversion problem is studied to relieve the heavy burden of DL training and feedback required for channel estimation. Learning- based methods perform well up to a certain array size, but for a fixed dataset size their accuracy deteriorates with the number of antennas, to the point where simple model-based methods outperform them. This paper identifies a key cause of this behavior and addresses it. The mean angle of arrival (AoA) induces a phase ramp along the lags of the CCM. Since the oscillation rate of this ramp grows with the number of antennas, a dataset of fixed size becomes increasingly sparse relative to the variation that must be captured. We propose estimating the slope of this ramp from the UL CCM separately and mapping it to the DL band in closed form, leaving the learner with a residual that is largely insensitive to the mean AoA, which substantially reduces the performance degradation with an increasing number of antennas. The proposed scheme, termed deramping, is a combination of pre- and post-processing steps that applies to learning-based conversion methods without altering their internal structure, as demonstrated on three structurally different learners. Simulation results show that deramping reduces the covariance estimation error of all three learners under uniform, Laplacian, and Gaussian angular power spectra,keeps the interpolation-based learners ahead of a model-based benchmark at large array sizes, and improves downlink channel estimation.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Active Inference for Slow and Fast Interaction Loops in Holographic-Type Communication

Holographic-type communication requires a new hologram when the viewer moves beyond the display's angular viewing zone, whereas image-to-3D reconstruction takes tens of seconds per asset. We separate these operations into a slow loop that reconstructs a persistent mesh and a fast loop that renders each viewpoint from the stored mesh. The fast loop takes 0.117 s independently of camera motion, compared with 13.8-14.8 s for a full reconstruction. An active-inference controller determines when to begin reconstruction from learned user-state transitions, whether to perform a full or regional update, and how much computation to allocate based on a monocular-depth detail measure. Regional updates preserve geometry outside the edited area. In a modeled 100-event session, separating the loops reduces mean latency per event from 14.8 to 4.4 s (3.4-fold); predictive reconstruction reduces it further to 1.7-2.9 s, depending on user routine strength.
Read the full abstract

All authors Kamran Fotovat, Kian Fotovat, Nika Hosseini, Martin Maier

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

AIR-LLM: Broadcasting AI Weights over Radio for Memory-Free Edge LLM Inference via RF Computing

Next-generation large language models (LLMs) are expanding from the cloud to ubiquitous edge devices. However, edge devices typically either lack the memory to store increasingly large LLM weights or, even with enough memory, spend unaffordable energy on loading the weights. This raises our question: can an edge device run an LLM without storing or loading its weights, but receive them over the air and consume them on the fly? Inspired by wireless broadcasting, we present AIR-LLM, an LLM inference architecture for edge devices, which is composed of: (i) a central radio (e.g., 5G base stations) that broadcasts the LLM weights into the air, and (ii) the edge user that receives the weights and completes the general matrix-vector multiplication (GEMV) of LLM inference directly in the radio frequency (RF) domain using RF mixers. To further shorten the airtime, AIR-LLM exploits MIMO spatial multiplexing and proposes an energy-efficient precoder-postcoder pair on the edge to calibrate its own wireless channel. Since the central radio stays user-unaware, AIR-LLM is user-scalable so that one broadcast serves unlimited users within its coverage. We implement AIR-LLM on the NVIDIA Sionna ray-traced channels of two real-world urban scenes and the profiling of a real RF mixer. With a WikiText-2 perplexity degradation of 4.0% on LLaMA-3.1-8B, AIR-LLM saves the energy by 157.7x/40.4x against the FP16 and weight-only quantization baselines; with 20 users, its airtime is 104.1x/26.0x shorter, respectively.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG

WIPSNet: Deep Learning for Paediatric Wheeze Detection from Overnight Impedance Pneumography

Overnight impedance pneumography (IP) is used to monitor paediatric respiratory health. Its current clinical readout, the Expiratory Variability Index (EVI), compresses each IP recording into a single scalar and achieves an AUC of 0.633 for night-level wheeze classification. We introduce Wheeze Impedance Pneumography Scalogram Network (WIPSNet), a 3D ResNet operating on stacked continuous wavelet transform scalograms of overnight IP signals. On a 15-patient cohort (60 nights, 281 hours), WIPSNet achieves an AUC of $0.783 \pm 0.026$, outperforming EVI, a state-space model (Mamba), and two modern sleep-staging architectures. Performance peaks at a volumetric depth corresponding to 32 minutes of temporal context, suggesting that multi-scale temporal aggregation is important for modelling nocturnal respiratory dynamics. Overall, these results indicate that structured time-frequency representations combined with 3D convolutional architectures provide an effective approach for learning from long, irregular physiological time series.
Read the full abstract

All authors Felix Oury, Harley Day, Karina Mayoral, Ville-Pekka Seppä, Sejal Saglani, Reiko J. Tanaka

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from eess.SY

Identifiability Limits of Forced Oscillation Sources in Power Systems

Whether a forced-oscillation source can be uniquely localized depends jointly on the available measurements and the candidate intervention dictionary. This paper considers a single unknown constant-amplitude sinusoid acting through one of physical intervention channels. Because its amplitude and phase are unknown, each candidate harmonic response is observable only up to a nonzero complex scalar and therefore defines a projective ray in measurement space. A necessary-and-sufficient condition is derived for exact localization, together with a weighted nearest-ray locator and a deterministic recovery bound based on projective separation. The paper proposes a framework distinguishing four mechanisms of source localization failure: mechanism mismatch, feature-projection loss, structural nonidentifiability, and poor conditioning or model error. Numerical studies on the Kundur two-area system illustrate well-separated recovery, mechanism-dependent terminal decisions, measurement-induced ambiguity, and the sensitivity of nearly collinear signatures to model perturbations. Then, IEEE–NASPI Contest models are used to further examine broad candidate dictionaries, terminal-feature source coverage, and ambiguity removal through measurement augmentation. The results show that correctly locating the source bus does not by itself establish unique identification of the internal forcing channel or robustness to measurement and model uncertainty.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Uncertainty-Guided UAV Spectrum Cartography with Deep-Unfolded Online Tensor Decomposition

Spectrum cartography is crucial for spectrum-aware resource management in low-altitude networks, where uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) collect spectrum measurements to reconstruct power spectral density (PSD) maps. However, limited energy and sensing bandwidth make measurements sparse in space and incomplete in frequency. To collect these measurements efficiently, the UAV actively plans its next move based on the latest map and its uncertainty, which requires rapid online reconstruction. We therefore propose an active online spectrum cartography framework. We first develop online deep-unfolded tensor decomposition (ODU-TD) for rapid map updates. An ensemble of reconstructors then estimates uncertainty to select informative sensing targets, and a learning-based policy determines the UAV movement and sensing bandwidth under the energy budget. Experiments show that ODU-TD achieves an approximately 27-fold speedup over online tensor decomposition and the lowest normalized mean square error (NMSE) among the compared reconstructors under sparse spatial and spectral observations, and the proposed framework reduces the NMSE by at least 55% compared with the representative baselines.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from stat.ML

Signal Processing over Product DAGs: Causal Shifts and Filters

We develop a signal processing framework for signals indexed by the product of two directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and described by a linear structural equation model (SEM). Such a setup arises whenever (linear) causal relations act along two domains, as in component versus manufacturing stage or gene versus experimental condition. Disregarding the factorization of the underlying graph and the native two-axis causal structure requires inverting a weighted transitive closure matrix whose size is the product of the two factor sizes for Fourier analysis. Recognizing that standard graph products fail to yield factorizable transitive closures, we introduce a new DAG product under which separability holds. We motivate the new operator in the vertex domain, and show that it also renders the SEM, the Fourier modes, the causal shifts, and the filters on the product DAG separable across its constituent graph factors.
Read the full abstract

All authors Sundeep Prabhakar Chepuri, Antonio G. Marques, Maulik Devmurari, Gonzalo Mateos

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

Covariance Eigenspace Provides Latent Attribution of Longitudinal Effects in Brain Age Gap

Brain age gap is a promising machine learning (ML)-driven bio\-marker of accelerated biological aging and is derived from neuroimaging data. Recent works on coVariance neural networks (VNN) for brain age gap prediction have provided an explainable and anatomically verifiable framework for brain age gap prediction. Notably, VNN outcomes are derived by filtering inputs along covariance eigenvectors, providing a mechanism for explaining their decisions in terms of latent (orthogonal) vectors. In this paper, we investigate the longitudinal brain age gap effects in a Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) cohort using a VNN-driven brain age gap prediction framework. Specifically, using Integrated Gradients (IG) as the attribution mechanism, our results demonstrate that the eigenspectrum of the anatomical covariance matrix explains the different longitudinal effects observed in brain age gap in amyloid positive vs amyloid negative subcohorts more prominently than individual brain regions ($83.2\%$ with the leading eigenvector versus a maximal value of $7.7\%$ for any brain region). Therefore, the covariance-based latent explanation identifies a key coordinated input pattern that carries most of the observed longitudinal effect in brain age gap.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Non-Invasive Inspection of Water Canals Using Dronar

Open concrete canals play a vital role in water transportation, serving as primary water infrastructure for millions of people across the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area. Over time, the concrete canals can experience a range of issues, including canal lining deformation, cracked concrete, and sediment buildup on the canal floor. Identifying such critical issues is a resource-intensive process, which currently happens only during four-year dry-up cycles. This prevents the maintenance crew from prioritizing operations on the most affected canal segments. To address this issue, the research team has developed and verified an easily deployable and non-invasive method to inspect canal beds without draining the water. This inspection system integrates affordable, off-the-shelf drone and sonar technology (termed dronar). This dronar system includes a consumer-grade sonar system integrated into an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) that carries the sonar transducer just under the surface of the canal water. This paper presents a proof-of-concept demonstration of the dronar system across three field tests on the Arizona Canal in Phoenix. DownScan depth profiles from the sedimented canal segment were consistently shallower than profiles from the same segment after cleaning, with offsets of up to 15 cm observed along the track. Repeated runs over the clean segment produced closely overlapping DownScan depth profiles, confirming that the dronar yields repeatable measurements across the natural variation of the canal bed. These results establish the dronar as a viable proof-of-concept tool for non-invasive canal bed inspection.
Read the full abstract

All authors Michael Zielinski, Zhizhan Wang, Benjamin Dymond, Reza Razavian, Zhongwang Dou

Signal Processing

Grounding Time-Series Foundation Models in Digital Twin Topology for Predictive Maintenance

Digital twins increasingly support downstream analytical tasks that depend on time-series data, motivating interest in time-series foundation models (TSFMs) as scalable backbones. However, TSFMs are primarily pretrained for temporal continuation and often underperform on unseen tasks such as regression, and systematic empirical comparisons against state-of-the-art dedicated models in digital twin contexts remain limited. This paper makes three contributions. First, we benchmark five well-known TSFMs with frozen backbones on remaining useful life (RUL) prediction using the C-MAPSS dataset, finding that multivariate architectures substantially outperform univariate ones, particularly under varying operating conditions. This raises a deeper question: when cross-channel dependencies can be modeled through pretrained weights, target-task adaptation, and digital twin-derived representations, how much does each contribute, and are they complementary? Second, we propose a topology-informed fusion approach in which topological constraints, derived from the asset structure the digital twin stores among its information models, explicitly shape cross-attention, so that fused representations respect the physical system's local connectivity rather than relying on unconstrained all-to-all interactions. Third, we conduct an ablation study across C-MAPSS subsets of varying operational complexity that isolates the three sources and their interactions. The sources prove complementary rather than redundant, and topology-constrained attention outperforms unconstrained fusion, though by a small margin, enabling a frozen TSFM informed by digital twin representations to remain competitive or in some cases exceed state-of-the-art performance on this regression task.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.AI

AIMS: An Agentic AI Framework for Sim-to-Real Multi-Modal ISAC

Multi-modal integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables environmental perception and reliable connectivity for intelligent wireless networks. Data-driven multi-modal ISAC models depend heavily on annotated real-world data to learn relationships across sensing and wireless observations, thereby constraining scalable deployment. Although synthetic data generation reduces the burden, adapting existing simulation pipelines to a target deployment requires consistent scene, sensing, wireless, and learning configurations, while mismatches among these coupled components impair sim-to-real transferability. To address the challenge, we propose an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) framework for sim-to-real multi-modal ISAC, named AIMS. Given a natural-language deployment request specifying the target task, deployment conditions, and real-data budget, AIMS derives a deployment-specific sim-to-real configuration and coordinates its execution to produce a deployment-specific task model. A two-agent architecture coordinates scene construction with task learning. A scene construction agent generates geographically grounded, synchronized sensing and wireless records from shared physical states, while a scene understanding agent configures task-relevant modalities and mixture-of-experts (MoE) learning for zero-shot inference or few-shot adaptation. Structured domain knowledge guides dependency-aware planning, while validation evidence supports feedback-driven revision of affected decisions. Experiments on the real-world DeepSense 6G dataset demonstrate improved vehicle detection and beam prediction over the considered simulation and fusion baselines. A separate orchestration benchmark evaluates task interpretation, dependency reasoning, and feedback-driven replanning across diverse deployment requests, showing improved plan correctness with structured domain knowledge and validation feedback.
Read the full abstract

All authors Yijie Bian, Kai Zhang, Wei Guo, Zixin Wang, Shenghui Song, Jun Zhang, Khaled B. Letaief