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Electrical Engineering and Systems Science

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Thursday 15 January

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from physics.app-ph

Interfacing Superconductor and Semiconductor Digital Electronics

Interface circuits are the key components that enable the hybrid integration of superconductor and semiconductor digital electronics. The design requirements of superconductor-semiconductor interface circuits vary depending on the application, such as high-performance classical computing, superconducting quantum computing, and digital signal processing. In this survey, various interface circuits are categorized based on the working principle and structure. The superconducting output drivers are explored, which are capable of converting and amplifying, e.g., single flux quantum (SFQ) voltage pulses, to voltage levels that semiconductor circuits can process. Several trade-offs between circuit- and system-level design parameters are examined. Accordingly, parameters such as the data rate, output voltage, power dissipation, layout area, thermal/heat load of cryogenic cables, and bit-error rate are considered.
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Wednesday 14 January

Audio and Speech Processing

BickGraphing: Web-Based Application for Visual Inspection of Audio Recordings

BickGraphing is a browser based research tool that enables visual inspection of acoustic recordings. The tool was built in support of visualizing crop feeding pest sounds in support of the Insect Eavesdropper project; however, it is widely applicable to all audiovisualizations in research. It allows multiple uploads of large .wav files, computes waveforms and spectrograms locally, and supports interactive exploration of audio events in time and frequency. The application is implemented as a SvelteKit and TypeScript web app with a client side signal processing pipeline using WebAssembly compiled FFmpeg and custom FFT utilities. The software is released on an open Git repository (https://github.com/bicklabuw/BickGraphing) and archived under a standard MIT license and can be reused for rapid visual quality checks of .wav recordings in insect bioacoustics and related fields. BickGraphing has the potential to be a local, easy to use coding free visualization platform for audio data in research.
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All authors Kayley Seow, Alexander Arovas, Grace Steinmetz, Emily Bick

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.AI

Online parameter estimation for the Crazyflie quadcopter through an EM algorithm

Drones are becoming more and more popular nowadays. They are small in size, low in cost, and reliable in operation. They contain a variety of sensors and can perform a variety of flight tasks, reaching places that are difficult or inaccessible for humans. Earthquakes damage a lot of infrastructure, making it impossible for rescuers to reach some areas. But drones can help. Many amateur and professional photographers like to use drones for aerial photography. Drones play a non-negligible role in agriculture and transportation too. Drones can be used to spray pesticides, and they can also transport supplies. A quadcopter is a four-rotor drone and has been studied in this paper. In this paper, random noise is added to the quadcopter system and its effects on the drone system are studied. An extended Kalman filter has been used to estimate the state based on noisy observations from the sensor. Based on a SDE system, a linear quadratic Gaussian controller has been implemented. The expectation maximization algorithm has been applied for parameter estimation of the quadcopter. The results of offline parameter estimation and online parameter estimation are presented. The results show that the online parameter estimation has a slightly larger range of convergence values than the offline parameter estimation.
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Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

PSSF: Early osteoarthritis detection using physical synthetic knee X-ray scans and AI radiomics models

Knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a major cause of disability worldwide and is still largely assessed using subjective radiographic grading, most commonly the Kellgren-Lawrence (KL) scale. Artificial intelligence (AI) and radiomics offer quantitative tools for OA assessment but depend on large, well-annotated image datasets, mainly X-ray scans, that are often difficult to obtain because of privacy, governance and resourcing constraints. In this research, we introduce a physics-based synthetic simulation framework (PSSF) to fully generate controllable X-ray scans without patients' involvement and violating their privacy and institutional constraints. This PSSF is a 2D X-ray projection simulator of anteroposterior knee radiographs from a parametric anatomical model of the distal femur and proximal tibia. Using PSSF, we create a virtual cohort of 180 subjects (260 knees), each is imaged under three protocols (reference, low-dose, and geometry-shift). Medial joint regions are automatically localized, preprocessed, and processed with the Image Biomarker Standardisation Initiative (IBSI). Practically, three machine learning (ML) models are utilized, logistic regression, random forest, and gradient boosting, to train binary (KL-like "0" vs. "2") and three-class (0-2) prediction radiographic images. Robustness is assessed within IBSI protocol, cross-protocol, and multi-protocol scenarios. Finally, features stability is then evaluated using intraclass correlation coefficients across acquisition changes.
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Image and Video Processing

An Implementation of the Crack Topology Score with Extensions

The Crack Topology Score (CTS) is a recently proposed metric that focuses on evaluating the topological correctness of crack segmentation outputs. While pixel-wise metrics such as IoU or F1-score fail to capture structural validity, CTS offers a skeleton-based matching framework to measure the preservation of connectivity. This paper presents a faithful implementation of the CTS metric, along with optional preprocessing extensions designed to handle common prediction artifacts (e.g., small holes and edge noise) found in deep learning outputs. All extensions are disabled by default to ensure strict comparability with the original definition. The implementation supports PyTorch-based workflows and includes visualization tools for transparency. Code and archival resources will be made available at https://github.com/SH-Joo/crack-topology-score.
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Signal Processing

LSR-Net: A Lightweight and Strong Robustness Network for Bearing Fault Diagnosis in Noise Environment

Rotating bearings play an important role in modern industries, but have a high probability of occurrence of defects because they operate at high speed, high load, and poor operating environments. Therefore, if a delay time occurs when a bearing is diagnosed with a defect, this may cause economic loss and loss of life. Moreover, since the vibration sensor from which the signal is collected is highly affected by the operating environment and surrounding noise, accurate defect diagnosis in a noisy environment is also important. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and strong robustness network (LSR-Net) that is accurate in a noisy environment and enables real-time fault diagnosis. To this end, first, a denoising and feature enhancement module (DFEM) was designed to create a 3-channel 2D matrix by giving several nonlinearity to the feature-map that passed through the denoising module (DM) block composed of convolution-based denoising (CD) blocks. Moreover, adaptive pruning was applied to DM to improve denoising ability when the power of noise is strong. Second, for lightweight model design, a convolution-based efficiency shuffle (CES) block was designed using group convolution (GConv), group pointwise convolution (GPConv) and channel split that can design the model while maintaining low parameters. In addition, the trade-off between the accuracy and model computational complexity that can occur due to the lightweight design of the model was supplemented using attention mechanisms and channel shuffle. In order to verify the defect diagnosis performance of the proposed model, performance verification was conducted in a noisy environment using a vibration signal. As a result, it was confirmed that the proposed model had the best anti-noise ability compared to the benchmark models, and the computational complexity of the model was also the lowest.
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All authors Junseok Lee, Jihye Shin, Sangyong Lee, Chang-Jae Chun

Systems and Control

Collision Avoidance for Non-Cooperative Multi-Swarm Coverage Control with Bounded Disturbance Measurements

This paper proposes a new algorithm for collision-free coverage control of multiple non-cooperating swarms in the presence of bounded disturbances. A new methodology is introduced that accounts for uncertainties in disturbance measurements. The proposed methodology is used to develop an algorithm that ensures collision-free motion in multi-swarm coverage control, specifically for cases where disturbances are present and their measurements are subject to bounded uncertainty. The theoretical results are validated through simulations of multiple swarms that independently aim to cover a given region in an environment with disturbances.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Learning-Augmented Perfectly Secure Collaborative Matrix Multiplication

This paper presents a perfectly secure matrix multiplication (PSMM) protocol for multiparty computation (MPC) of $\mathrm{A}^{\top}\mathrm{B}$ over finite fields. The proposed scheme guarantees correctness and information-theoretic privacy against threshold-bounded, semi-honest colluding agents, under explicit local storage constraints. Our scheme encodes submatrices as evaluations of sparse masking polynomials and combines coefficient alignment with Beaver-style randomness to ensure perfect secrecy. We demonstrate that any colluding set of parties below the security threshold observes uniformly random shares, and that the recovery threshold is optimal, matching existing information-theoretic limits. Building on this framework, we introduce a learning-augmented extension that integrates tensor-decomposition-based local block multiplication, capturing both classical and learned low-rank methods. We demonstrate that the proposed learning-based PSMM preserves privacy and recovery guarantees for MPC, while providing scalable computational efficiency gains (up to $80\%$) as the matrix dimensions grow.
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All authors Zixuan He, Mohammad Reza Deylam Salehi, Derya Malak, Photios A. Stavrou

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

One-Cold Poisson Channel: A Simple Continuous-Time Channel with Zero Dispersion

We introduce the one-cold Poisson channel (OCPC), where the transmitter chooses one of several frequency bands to attenuate at a time. In particular, the perfect OCPC, where the number of bands is unlimited, is an extremely simple continuous-time memoryless channel. It has a capacity 1, zero channel dispersion, and an information spectrum being the degenerate distribution at 1. It is the only known nontrivial (discrete or continuous-time) memoryless channel with a closed-form formula for its optimal non-asymptotic error probability, making it the simplest channel in this sense. A potential application is optical communication with a tunable band rejection filter. Due to its simplicity, we may use it as a basic currency of information that is infinitely divisible, as an alternative to bits which are not infinitely divisible. OCPC with perfect feedback gives a generalization of prefix codes. We also study non-asymptotic coding and channel simulation results for the general OCPC.
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Signal Processing

Distributed Hypothesis Testing Under A Covertness Constraint

We study distributed hypothesis testing under a covertness constraint in the non-alert situation, which requires that under the null-hypothesis an external warden be unable to detect whether communication between the sensor and the decision center is taking place. We characterize the achievable Stein exponent of this setup when the channel from the sensor to the decision center is a partially-connected discrete memoryless channel (DMC), i.e., when certain output symbols can only be induced by some of the inputs. The Stein-exponent in this case, does not depend on the specific transition law of the DMC and equals Shalaby and Papamarcou's exponent without a warden but where the sensor can send $k$ noise-free bits to the decision center, for $k$ a function that is sublinear in the observation length $n$. For fully-connected DMCs, we propose an achievable Stein-exponent and show that it can improve over the local exponent at the decision center. All our coding schemes do not require that the sensor and decision center share a common secret key, as commonly assumed in covert communication. Moreover, in our schemes the divergence covertness constraint vanishes (almost) exponentially fast in the obervation length $n$, again, an atypical behaviour for covert communication.
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Signal Processing

Evaluating GAN-LSTM for Smart Meter Anomaly Detection in Power Systems

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) provides high-resolution electricity consumption data that can enhance monitoring, diagnosis, and decision making in modern power distribution systems. Detecting anomalies in these time-series measurements is challenging due to nonlinear, nonstationary, and multi-scale temporal behavior across diverse building types and operating conditions. This work presents a systematic, power-system-oriented evaluation of a GAN-LSTM framework for smart meter anomaly detection using the Large-scale Energy Anomaly Detection (LEAD) dataset, which contains one year of hourly measurements from 406 buildings. The proposed pipeline applies consistent preprocessing, temporal windowing, and threshold selection across all methods, and compares the GAN-LSTM approach against six widely used baselines, including statistical, kernel-based, reconstruction-based, and GAN-based models. Experimental results demonstrate that the GAN-LSTM significantly improves detection performance, achieving an F1-score of 0.89. These findings highlight the potential of adversarial temporal modeling as a practical tool for supporting asset monitoring, non-technical loss detection, and situational awareness in real-world power distribution networks. The code for this work is publicly available
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

FairShare: Auditable Geographic Fairness for Multi-Operator LEO Spectrum Sharing

Dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) among multi-operator low Earth orbit (LEO) mega-constellations is essential for coexistence, yet prevailing policies focus almost exclusively on interference mitigation, leaving geographic equity largely unaddressed. This work investigates whether conventional DSS approaches inadvertently exacerbate the rural digital divide. Incorporating Keplerian orbital dynamics, inter-beam co-channel interference, and three real-world constellation geometries (Starlink, OneWeb, Kuiper), we conduct large-scale, 3GPP-compliant non-terrestrial network (NTN) simulations across 20 orbital snapshots spanning 10~minutes of satellite motion. The results uncover a stark and persistent structural bias: SNR-priority scheduling induces a $1.84\times$ mean urban–rural access disparity, with temporal fluctuations reaching $3.9\times$ during favorable interference conditions. Counter-intuitively, increasing system bandwidth amplifies rather than alleviates this gap. To remedy this, we propose FairShare, a lightweight, quota-based framework that enforces geographic fairness. FairShare not only reverses the bias, achieving an affirmative disparity ratio of $\Delta_{\text{geo}} = 0.68\times$ with zero variance across all orbital snapshots and interference conditions, but also reduces scheduler runtime by 3.3%. This demonstrates that algorithmic fairness can be achieved without trading off efficiency or complexity, and that it remains invariant to physical-layer dynamics. Our work provides regulators with both a diagnostic metric for auditing fairness and a practical, enforceable mechanism for equitable spectrum governance in next-generation satellite networks.
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All authors Seyed Bagher Hashemi Natanzi, Hossein Mohammadi, Vuk Marojevic, Bo Tang

2601.09641 · 14 Jan · Withdrawn by the authors. An audit of the simulation code found an error in the satellite beam-gain model (off-boresight angle computed incorrectly) and a non-standard clutter model, which together produced the reported urban–rural disparity. With these corrected, the main conclusions do not hold.

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG

From Prompt to Protocol: Fast Charging Batteries with Large Language Models

Efficiently optimizing battery charging protocols is challenging because each evaluation is slow, costly, and non-differentiable. Many existing approaches address this difficulty by heavily constraining the protocol search space, which limits the diversity of protocols that can be explored, preventing the discovery of higher-performing solutions. We introduce two gradient-free, LLM-driven closed-loop methods: Prompt-to-Optimizer (P2O), which uses an LLM to propose the code for small neural-network-based protocols, which are then trained by an inner loop, and Prompt-to-Protocol (P2P), which simply writes an explicit function for the current and its scalar parameters. Across our case studies, LLM-guided P2O outperforms neural networks designed by Bayesian optimization, evolutionary algorithms, and random search. In a realistic fast charging scenario, both P2O and P2P yield around a 4.2 percent improvement in state of health (capacity retention based health metric under fast charging cycling) over a state-of-the-art multi-step constant current (CC) baseline, with P2P achieving this under matched evaluation budgets (same number of protocol evaluations). These results demonstrate that LLMs can expand the space of protocol functional forms, incorporate language-based constraints, and enable efficient optimization in high cost experimental settings.
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All authors Ge Lei, Ferran Brosa Planella, Sterling G. Baird, Samuel J. Cooper

Systems and Control

A Novel $\alpha\beta$-Approximation Method Based on Numerical Integration for Discretizing Continuous Systems

In this article, we propose a novel discretization method based on numerical integration for discretizing continuous systems, termed the $\alpha\beta$-approximation or Scalable Bilinear Transformation (SBT). In contrast to existing methods, the proposed method consists of two factors, i.e., shape factor ($\alpha$) and time factor ($\beta$). Depending on the discretization technique applied, we identify two primary distortion modes in discrete resonant controllers: frequency warping and resonance damping. We further provide a theoretical explanation for these distortion modes, and demonstrate that the performance of the method is superior to all typical methods. The proposed method is implemented to discretize a quasi-resonant (QR) controller on a control board, achieving 25% reduction in the root-mean-square error (RMSE) compared to the SOTA method. Finally, the approach is extended to discretizing a resonant controller of a grid-tied inverter. The efficacy of the proposed method is conclusively validated through favorable comparisons among the theory, simulation, and experiments.
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All authors Shen Chen, Chaohou Liu, Wei Yao, Jisong Wang, Shuaipo Guo, Zeng Liu, Jinjun Liu

Systems and Control

Residual Power Flow for Neural Solvers

The energy transition challenges operational tasks based on simulations and optimisation. These computations need to be fast and flexible as the grid is ever-expanding, and renewables' uncertainty requires a flexible operational environment. Learned approximations, proxies or surrogates – we refer to them as Neural Solvers – excel in terms of evaluation speed, but are inflexible with respect to adjusting to changing tasks. Hence, neural solvers are usually applicable to highly specific tasks, which limits their usefulness in practice; a widely reusable, foundational neural solver is required. Therefore, this work proposes the Residual Power Flow (RPF) formulation. RPF formulates residual functions based on Kirchhoff's laws to quantify the infeasibility of an operating condition. The minimisation of the residuals determines the voltage solution; an additional slack variable is needed to achieve AC-feasibility. RPF forms a natural, foundational subtask of tasks subject to power flow constraints. We propose to learn RPF with neural solvers to exploit their speed. Furthermore, RPF improves learning performance compared to common power flow formulations. To solve operational tasks, we integrate the neural solver in a Predict-then-Optimise (PO) approach to combine speed and flexibility. The case study investigates the IEEE 9-bus system and three tasks (AC Optimal Power Flow (OPF), power-flow and quasi-steady state power flow) solved by PO. The results demonstrate the accuracy and flexibility of learning with RPF.
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Signal Processing

Echo-Side Integrated Sensing and Communication via Space-Time Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

This paper presents an echo-side modulation framework for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. A space-time reconfigurable intelligent surface (ST-RIS) impresses a continuous-phase modulation onto the radar echo, enabling uplink data transmission with a phase modulation of the transmitted radar-like waveform. The received signal is a multiplicative composition of the sensing waveform and the phase for communication. Both functionalities share the same physical signal and perceive each other as impairments. The achievable communication rate is expressed as a function of a coupling parameter that links sensing accuracy to phase error accumulation. Under a fixed bandwidth constraint, the sensing and communication figures of merit define a convex Pareto frontier. The optimal bandwidth allocation satisfying a minimum sensing requirement is derived in closed form. The modified Cramer-Rao bound (MCRB) for range estimation is derived in closed form; this parameter must be estimated to compensate for the frequency offset before data demodulation. Frame synchronization is formulated as a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), and the detection probability is obtained through characteristic function inversion, accounting for residual frequency errors from imperfect range estimation. Numerical results validate the theoretical bounds and characterize the trade-off across the operating range.
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Signal Processing

Two-Scale Spatial Deployment for Cost-Effective Wireless Networks via Cooperative IRSs and Movable Antennas

This paper proposes a two-scale spatial deployment strategy to ensure reliable coverage for multiple target areas, integrating macroscopic intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) and fine-grained movable antennas (MAs). Specifically, IRSs are selectively deployed from candidate sites to shape the propagation geometry, while MAs are locally repositioned among discretized locations to exploit small-scale channel variations. The objective is to minimize the total deployment cost of MAs and IRSs by jointly optimizing the IRS site selection, MA positions, transmit precoding, and IRS phase shifts, subject to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) requirements for all target areas. This leads to a challenging mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem that is intractable to solve directly. To address this, we first formulate an auxiliary problem to verify the feasibility. A penalty-based double-loop algorithm integrating alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA) is developed to solve this feasibility issue, which is subsequently adapted to obtain a suboptimal solution for the original cost minimization problem. Finally, based on the obtained solution, we formulate an element refinement problem to further reduce the deployment cost, which is solved by a penalty-based SCA algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed designs consistently outperform benchmarks relying on independent area planning or full IRS deployment in terms of cost-efficiency. Moreover, for cost minimization, MA architectures are preferable in large placement apertures, whereas fully populated FPA architectures excel in compact ones; for worst-case SNR maximization, MA architectures exhibit a lower cost threshold for feasibility, while FPA architectures can attain peak SNR at a lower total cost.
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All authors Ying Gao, Qingqing Wu, Ziyuan Zheng, Yanze Zhu, Wen Chen, Xin Lin, Shanpu Shen

Signal Processing

Beamforming Gain with Nonideal Phase Shifters

This research sets forth a universal framework to characterize the beamforming gain achievable with arbitrarily nonideal phase shifters. Precisely, the maximum possible shortfall relative to the gain attainable with ideal phase shifters is established. Such shortfall is shown to be fundamentally determined by the perimeter of the convex hull of the set of feasible beamforming coefficients on the complex plane. This result holds regardless of whether the beamforming is at the transmitter, at the receiver, or at a reconfigurable intelligent surface. In i.i.d. fading channels, the shortfall hardens to the maximum possible shortfall as the number of antennas grows.
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Systems and Control

Semi-Contention-Free Access in IoT NOMA Networks: A Reinforcement Learning Framework

The unprecedented surge of massive Internet of things (mIoT) traffic in beyond fifth generation (B5G) communication systems calls for transformative approaches for multiple access and data transmission. While classical model-based tools have been proven to be powerful and precise, an imminent trend for resource management in B5G networks is promoting solutions towards data-driven design. Considering an IoT network with devices spread in clusters covered by a base station, we present in this paper a novel model-free multiple access and data transmission framework empowered by reinforcement learning, designed for power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access networks to facilitate uplink traffic of small data packets. The framework supports two access modes referred to as contention-based and semi-contention-free, with its core component being a policy gradient algorithm executed at the base station. The base station performs access control and optimal radio resource allocation by periodically broadcasting two control parameters to each cluster of devices that considerably reduce data detection failures with a minimum computation requirement on devices. Numerical results, in terms of system and cluster throughput, throughput fairness, access delay, and energy consumption, demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of the framework as network size and traffic load vary.
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All authors Abhishek Kumar, José-Ramón Vidal, Jorge Martinez-Bauset, Frank Y. Li

Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD

Speech-Hands: A Self-Reflection Voice Agentic Approach to Speech Recognition and Audio Reasoning with Omni Perception

We introduce a voice-agentic framework that learns one critical omni-understanding skill: knowing when to trust itself versus when to consult external audio perception. Our work is motivated by a crucial yet counterintuitive finding: naively fine-tuning an omni-model on both speech recognition and external sound understanding tasks often degrades performance, as the model can be easily misled by noisy hypotheses. To address this, our framework, Speech-Hands, recasts the problem as an explicit self-reflection decision. This learnable reflection primitive proves effective in preventing the model from being derailed by flawed external candidates. We show that this agentic action mechanism generalizes naturally from speech recognition to complex, multiple-choice audio reasoning. Across the OpenASR leaderboard, Speech-Hands consistently outperforms strong baselines by 12.1% WER on seven benchmarks. The model also achieves 77.37% accuracy and high F1 on audio QA decisions, showing robust generalization and reliability across diverse audio question answering datasets. By unifying perception and decision-making, our work offers a practical path toward more reliable and resilient audio intelligence.
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All authors Zhen Wan, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Jinchuan Tian, Hanrong Ye, Ankita Pasad, Szu-wei Fu, Arushi Goel, Ryo Hachiuma, Shizhe Diao, Kunal Dhawan, Sreyan Ghosh, Yusuke Hirota, Zhehuai Chen, Rafael Valle, Chenhui Chu, Shinji Watanabe, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Boris Ginsburg

Signal Processing

Uplink Multi-User MIMO Implementation in OpenAirInterface

Cell-Free Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) have been active research topics in the wireless communication community in recent years. As an open-source software implementation of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) 5th Generation (5G) protocol stack, OpenAirInterface (OAI) has become a valuable tool for deploying and testing new ideas in wireless communication systems. In this paper, we present our OAI-based real-time uplink Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) testbed developed at Fraunhofer HHI. As a part of our Cell-Free MIMO testbed development, we built a 2x2 MU-MIMO system using general purpose computers and commercially available software defined radios (SDRs). Using a modified OAI next-Generation Node-B (gNB) and two unmodified OAI user equipment (UE), we show that it is feasible to use Sounding Reference Signal (SRS) channel estimates to compute uplink combiners. Our results verify that this method can be used to separate and decode signals from two users transmitting in non-orthogonal time-frequency resources. This work serves as an important verification step to build a complete Cell-Free MU-MIMO system that leverages time domain duplexing (TDD) reciprocity to perform downlink beamforming over multiple cells
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All authors Utku Uçak, Fariba Armandoust, Matthias Mehlhose, Daniel Schäufele, Jochen Fink, Renato L. G. Cavalcante, Sławomir Stańczak

Systems and Control

Gamma Process Degradation Modeling and Performance-Driven Opportunistic Maintenance Optimization for LED Lighting Systems

LED lighting systems consist of multiple LED luminaires, each subject to gradual package degradation and abrupt driver failures. Their acceptability is governed by long-term spatio-temporal illuminance compliance on the working plane, which is shaped collectively by all luminaire states, rather than by individual luminaire reliability alone. Current practice, however, verifies compliance only at commissioning through static indices, which cannot capture intermittent or persistent violations accumulated over the operating horizon. This paper proposes a performance-driven, simulation-in-the-loop framework for opportunistic maintenance optimization of LED lighting systems. Package degradation is modeled by a non-homogeneous Gamma process aligned with the IESNA TM-21 lumen maintenance projection method. Driver failures are described by a Weibull lifetime model. The two mechanisms are then integrated into a unified luminaire state via a competing-failure formulation. Model parameters are calibrated from IESNA LM-80 test data via Bayesian inference, with uncertainty propagated from stress levels to service conditions. A programmatic workflow integrates degradation modeling, ray-tracing simulation, and performance evaluation, mapping stochastic luminaire trajectories to the working plane illuminance field. To characterize long-term system performance, a deficiency ratio is defined to quantify the fraction of operational time during which average illuminance or uniformity requirements are violated. To enable scalable Monte Carlo evaluation, a surrogate model with high predictive fidelity replaces repeated Radiance evaluations. The opportunistic maintenance policy is then optimized in a multi-objective setting, balancing performance deficiency and maintenance effort. A realistic office-zone case study demonstrates the framework and reveals Pareto trade-offs for maintenance decision support.
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All authors Haohao Shi, Huy Truong-Ba, Michael E. Cholette, Brenden Harris, Juan Montes, Tommy Chan

Signal Processing

Unique Word Channel Estimation for Oversampled OTFS

Practical aspects of orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), such as channel estimation and its performance in fractional delay-Doppler (DD) channels, are a lively topic in the OTFS community. Oversampling and pulse shaping are also discussed in the existing literature, but not in the context of channel estimation. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to address the problem of data-to-pilot and vice versa energy leakage caused by oversampling and pulse shaping in OTFS. Theoretical analysis is performed on an oversampled, pulse-shaped OTFS implementing the embedded pilot channel estimation technique, revealing a trade-off between the amount of energy leakage and excess bandwidth introduced by the pulse shape. Next, a novel variant of OTFS is introduced, called UW-OTFS, which is designed to overcome the leakage problem by placing the pilot in the oversampled time domain instead of the DD domain. The unique structure of UW-OTFS offers 36 percent higher spectral efficiency than the OTFS with embedded pilot. UW-OTFS also outperforms traditional OTFS in terms of bit error ratio and out-of-band emissions.
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All authors Radim Zedka, Roman Marsalek, Marek Bobula, Arman Farhang

Signal Processing

A Hybrid Machine Learning Framework for Improved Short-Term Peak-Flow Forecasting

Reliable river flow forecasting is an essential component of flood risk management and early warning systems. It enables improved emergency response coordination and is critical for protecting infrastructure, communities, and ecosystems from extreme hydrological events. Process-based hydrological models and purely data-driven approaches often underperform during extreme events, particularly in forecasting peak flows. To address this limitation, this study introduces a hybrid forecasting framework that couples Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Random Forest (RF). XGBoost is employed for continuous streamflow forecasting, while RF is specifically trained for peak-flow prediction, and the two outputs are combined into an enhanced forecast. The approach is implemented across 857 catchments of the LamaH-CE dataset, using rainfall and discharge observations at 6-hour resolution. Results demonstrate consistently high skill, with 71% of catchments achieving a Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) greater than 0.90. Peak-flow detection reaches 87%, with a false-alarm rate of 13%. Compared to the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS), the framework achieves lower peak-magnitude errors, fewer false alarms, and improved streamflow and peak-flow forecasting accuracy. The proposed framework is computationally lightweight, scalable, and easily transferable across watersheds, with training times of only seconds on standard CPUs. These findings highlight the potential of integrating hydrological understanding with efficient machine learning to improve the accuracy and reliability of operational flood forecasting, and outline future directions for hybrid hydrological-machine learning model development.
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All authors Gabriele Bertoli, Kai Schroeter, Rossella Arcucci, Enrica Caporali

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Feedback-Based Mobile Robot Navigation in 3-D Environments Using Artificial Potential Functions Technical Report

This technical report presents the construction and analysis of polynomial navigation functions for motion planning in 3-D workspaces populated by spherical and cylindrical obstacles. The workspace is modeled as a bounded spherical region, and obstacles are encoded using smooth polynomial implicit functions. We establish conditions under which the proposed navigation functions admit a unique non-degenerate minimum at the target while avoiding local minima, including in the presence of pairwise intersecting obstacles. Gradient and Hessian analyses are provided, and the theoretical results are validated through numerical simulations in obstacle rich 3-D environments.
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Signal Processing

Range-Doppler-Acceleration Estimation for Fast-Moving and Accelerating Targets

A central aspect of every pulsed radar signal processor is the targets Range-Doppler estimation within a Coherent Processing Interval. Conventional methods typically rely on simplifying assumptions, such as linear target motion, narrowband operation, or constant velocity, to enable fast computation. However, these assumptions break down in scenarios involving quadratic range-time behavior, high radial velocities or accelerations, or wideband signals, leading to undesired effects such as intra-pulse Doppler shift/stretch and target migration across Range-Doppler cells. This paper presents a generalized waveform-independent Range-Doppler compression approach that compensates for these effects while maintaining minimal Signal-to-Noise-Ratio loss and practical computational efficiency. The performance limits of the proposed method are analyzed and expressed through a unified metric that depends on both scene and system parameters. Comparison with other approaches is presented, showing their estimation bias and performance degradation.
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Systems and Control

On Discrete Age of Information of Status Updating System With General Packet Arrival Processes

Characterizing Age of Information (AoI) in status updating systems with general arrival and service processes has great significance considering that the interarrival and service time of updates can possibly be arbitrary in a real world. While expressions of average continuous AoI under G/G/1/1 queues have been derived in the paper by Soysal and Ulukus, the discrete case remained unsolved. To address it, this paper gives a fully characterization of probability generation functions (PGF) of discrete AoI under G/G/1/1 settings when preemption is allowed. In the non-preemptive case, this paper gives the expressions of PGF of discrete AoI under G/Geo/1/1 settings, which also extends the former results. The average discrete AoI is derived and discussed based on these new theoretical findings.
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All authors Jixiang Zhang, Han Xu, Daming Cao, Yinfei Xu, Minghao Chen, Chengyu Lin

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CR

Explainable Autoencoder-Based Anomaly Detection in IEC 61850 GOOSE Networks

The IEC 61850 Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) protocol plays a critical role in real-time protection and automation of digital substations, yet its lack of native security mechanisms can expose power systems to sophisticated cyberattacks. Traditional rule-based and supervised intrusion detection techniques struggle to detect protocol-compliant and zero-day attacks under significant class imbalance and limited availability of labeled data. This paper proposes an explainable, unsupervised multi-view anomaly detection framework for IEC 61850 GOOSE networks that explicitly separates semantic integrity and temporal availability. The approach employs asymmetric autoencoders trained only on real operational GOOSE traffic to learn distinct latent representations of sequence-based protocol semantics and timing-related transmission dynamics in normal traffic. Anomaly detection is implemented using reconstruction errors mixed with statistically grounded thresholds, enabling robust detection without specified attack types. Feature-level reconstruction analysis provides intrinsic explainability by directly linking detection outcomes to IEC 61850 protocol characteristics. The proposed framework is evaluated using real substation traffic for training and a public dataset containing normal traffic and message suppression, data manipulation, and denial-of-service attacks for testing. Experimental results show attack detection rates above 99% with false positives remaining below 5% of total traffic, demonstrating strong generalization across environments and effective operation under extreme class imbalance and interpretable anomaly attribution.
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All authors Dafne Lozano-Paredes, Luis Bote-Curiel, Juan Ramón Feijóo-Martínez, Ismael Gómez-Talal, José Luis Rojo-Álvarez

Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

DeTracker: Motion-decoupled Vehicle Detection and Tracking in Unstabilized Satellite Videos

Satellite videos provide continuous observations of surface dynamics but pose significant challenges for multi-object tracking (MOT), especially under unstabilized conditions where platform jitter and the weak appearance of tiny objects jointly degrade tracking performance. To address this problem, we propose DeTracker, a joint-detection-and-tracking framework tailored for unstabilized satellite videos. DeTracker introduces a task-driven Global-Local Motion Decoupling (GLMD) module to address the motion imbalance between dominant platform motion and weak target motion. It suppresses background-dominated motion via global semantic alignment at the feature level and captures target-specific motion through local refinement, improving trajectory stability and identity consistency. In addition, a Temporal Dependency Feature Pyramid (TDFP) module is developed to perform cross-frame temporal feature fusion, enhancing the continuity and discriminability of tiny-object representations. We further construct a new benchmark dataset, SDM-Car-SU, which simulates multi-directional and multi-speed platform motions to enable systematic evaluation of tracking robustness under varying motion perturbations. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real unstabilized satellite videos demonstrate that DeTracker significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving 61.1% MOTA on SDM-Car-SU and 45.3% MOTA on real satellite video data. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/alex-chenjiajun/DeTracker.
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All authors Jiajun Chen, Jing Xiao, Shaohan Cao, Yuming Zhu, Liang Liao, Jun Pan, Mi Wang

Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD

DSA-Tokenizer: Disentangled Semantic-Acoustic Tokenization via Flow Matching-based Hierarchical Fusion

Speech tokenizers are a key building block of fully discrete Speech LLMs. Existing tokenizers either prioritize semantic encoding, fuse semantic content with acoustic style inseparably, or achieve incomplete semantic-acoustic disentanglement. To achieve better disentanglement, we propose DSA-Tokenizer, which explicitly disentangles speech into discrete semantic and acoustic tokens via distinct optimization constraints. Specifically, semantic tokens are supervised by ASR to capture linguistic content, while acoustic tokens focus on mel-spectrograms restoration to encode style. We further introduce a hierarchical Flow Matching decoder and a joint reconstruction-context inpainting training strategy, allowing the model to support both high-fidelity reconstruction and cross-utterance voice clone. To speed up inference, we distill the dit decoder to 4-step inference and improve synthesis quality with GAN fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that DSA-Tokenizer provides strong semantic-acoustic disentanglement, reliable controllable voice cloning, and efficient high-fidelity generation with low WER/CER. Moreover, our results suggest that disentangled tokenization provides a more effective interface for downstream large-model speech generation. Audio samples are avaialble at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/DSA_Tokenizer_demo/
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All authors Hanlin Zhang, Daxin Tan, Dehua Tao, Xiao Chen, Haochen Tan, Yunhe Li, Yuchen Cao, Linqi Song