Papers

Piezoelectric nanopositioning systems are widely used in precision applications that require nanometer accuracy and high-speed motion; however, lightly damped resonances and pronounced cross-axis coupling severely limit bandwidth and disturbance rejection. This paper presents a decentralized dual-loop control strategy for a two-axis nanopositioner, combining an inner non-minimum-phase resonant damping controller with an outer motion controller on each axis. The dominant diagonal resonance is actively damped to enable closed-loop bandwidths beyond the first structural mode, while a parallel band-pass damping path is specifically tuned to a higher-order resonance that predominantly affects the cross-coupling channels. Experimental results demonstrate that this targeted band-pass damping substantially reduces cross-axis coupling and enhances disturbance rejection, without compromising tracking accuracy.

Unauthorized screen-shooting poses a critical data leakage risk. Resisting screen-shooting attacks typically requires high-strength watermark embedding, inevitably degrading the cover image. To resolve the robustness-fidelity conflict, non-intrusive watermarking has emerged as a solution by constructing logical verification keys without altering the original content. However, existing non-intrusive schemes lack the capacity to withstand screen-shooting noise. While deep learning offers a potential remedy, we observe that directly applying it leads to a previously underexplored failure mode, the Structural Shortcut: networks tend to learn trivial identity mappings and neglect the image-watermark binding. Furthermore, even when logical binding is enforced, standard training strategies cannot fully bridge the noise gap, yielding suboptimal robustness against physical distortions. In this paper, we propose NiMark, an end-to-end framework addressing these challenges. First, to eliminate the structural shortcut, we introduce the Sigmoid-Gated XOR (SG-XOR) estimator to enable gradient propagation for the logical operation, effectively enforcing rigid image-watermark binding. Second, to overcome the robustness bottleneck, we devise a two-stage training strategy integrating a restorer to bridge the domain gap caused by screen-shooting noise. Experiments demonstrate that NiMark consistently outperforms representative state-of-the-art methods against both digital attacks and screen-shooting noise, while maintaining zero visual distortion.

As one of the most advanced variants in the correntropy family, the multi-kernel correntropy criterion demonstrates superior accuracy in handling non-Gaussian noise, particularly with multimodal distributions. However, current approaches suffer from key limitations-namely, reliance on a single type of sensitive Gaussian kernel and the manual selection of free parameters. To address these issues and further boost robustness, this paper introduces the concept of multi-kernel mixture correntropy (MKMC), along with its key properties. MKMC employs a flexible kernel function composed of a mixture of two Students t-Cauchy functions with adjustable (non-zero) means. Building on this criterion within multi-sensor networks, we propose a robust distributed extended Kalman filter-AMKMMC-RDEKF based on adaptive multi-kernel mixture maximum correntropy. To reduce communication overhead, a consensus averaging strategy is incorporated. Furthermore, an adaptive mechanism is introduced to mitigate the impact of manually tuned free parameters. At the same time, the computational complexity and convergence ability of the proposed algorithm are analyzed. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated through challenging scenarios involving power system and land vehicle state estimation.

Despite recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their ability to understand and interact with music remains limited. Music understanding requires grounded reasoning over symbolic scores and expressive performance audio, which general-purpose MLLMs often fail to handle due to insufficient perceptual grounding. We introduce MuseAgent, a music-centric multimodal agent that augments language models with structured symbolic representations derived from sheet music images and performance audio. By integrating optical music recognition and automatic music transcription modules, MuseAgent enables multi-step reasoning and interaction over fine-grained musical content. To systematically evaluate music understanding capabilities, we further propose MuseBench, a benchmark covering music theory reasoning, score interpretation, and performance-level analysis across text, image, and audio modalities. Experiments show that existing MLLMs perform poorly on these tasks, while MuseAgent achieves substantial improvements, highlighting the importance of structured multimodal grounding for interactive music understanding.

As the dependence on satellite imaging continues to grow, modern satellites have become increasingly agile, with the new generation, namely super-agile Earth observation satellites (SAEOS), providing unprecedented imaging flexibility. The highly dynamic capabilities of these satellites introduce additional challenges to the scheduling of observation tasks, as existing approaches for conventional agile satellites do not account for variable observation durations and multiple imaging directions. Although some efforts have been made in this regard, the SAEOS imaging scheduling problem (SAEOS-ISP) remains largely unexplored, and no exact approaches have yet been proposed. In this context, this study presents the first exact Constraint Programming formulation for the SAEOS-ISP, considering flexible observation windows, multiple pointing directions and sequence-dependent transition times across multiple satellites. Computational experiments on a newly generated benchmark set demonstrate that the model can be solved efficiently and within very short computational times. Moreover, the results also show that the proposed approach has the potential to achieve higher computational performance compared to the non-exact approaches that are currently considered state-of-the-art.

Most systems exhibit significant variability in their dynamics, including variations in system parameters and large high-frequency dynamic uncertainties. Traditional uncertainty modelling techniques consolidate all such variations into a single uncertainty block, often yielding overly conservative representations of the true plant behaviour. This paper introduces an uncertainty modelling framework that employs multiple structured and unstructured uncertainty blocks to reduce this conservatism. The methodology is evaluated for an industrial piezoelectric nanopositioner subject to payload-induced variations, using uncertainty models of differing complexity. A bandpass controller is synthesised via structured mixed-{\mu} synthesis, and the resulting designs are compared in terms of conservatism of the uncertainty model, robust performance, and computational effort.

Obtaining data on high-impact falls from older adults is ethically difficult, yet these rare events cause many fall-related health problems. As a result, most radar-based fall detectors are trained on staged falls from young volunteers, and representation choices are rarely tested against the radar signals from dangerous falls. This paper uses a frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar digital twin as a single simulated room testbed to study how representation choice affects fall/non-fall discrimination. From the same simulated range-Doppler sequence, Doppler-time spectrograms, three-channel per-receiver spectrogram stacks, and time-pooled range-Doppler maps (RDMs) are derived and fed to an identical compact CNN under matched training on a balanced fall/non-fall dataset. In this twin, temporal spectrograms reach 98-99% test accuracy with similar precision and recall for both classes, while static RDMs reach 89.4% and show more variable training despite using the same backbone. A qualitative comparison between synthetic and measured fall spectrograms suggests that the twin captures gross Doppler-time structure, but amplitude histograms reveal differences in the distributions of amplitude values consistent with receiver processing not modeled in the twin. Because the twin omits noise and hardware impairments and is only qualitatively compared to a single measured example, these results provide representation-level guidance under controlled synthetic conditions rather than ready-to-use clinical performance in real settings.

Indoor occupancy classification enables privacy-preserving monitoring in settings such as remote elder care, where presence information helps triage alarms without cameras or wearables. Radar suits this role by sensing motion through occlusions and in darkness. Modern deep-learning pipelines are the standard for interpreting radar returns effectively; however, they are often parameter-heavy and sensitive at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), motivating compact alternatives like Hybrid Quantum Neural Networks (HQNNs). A two-qubit HQNN is benchmarked against convolutional neural networks (CNNs) using a physics-informed 60GHz digital twin and real radar measurements under matched training protocols. In clean conditions, the HQNN achieves high accuracy (99.7% synthetic; 97.0% real) with up to 170x fewer parameters (0.066M). Its parameter efficiency is shown to be structural, as an ablation of the parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) causes sharp performance drops on real data (to 68.5% and 31.5% for the control heads). A domain-dependent sensitivity emerges under additive-noise evaluation, where the HQNN begins recovery earlier in synthetic data while CNNs recover more steeply and peak higher on real measurements. In label-fraction ablations, CNNs prove more sample-efficient on real Range-Doppler Maps (RDMs), with the performance gap being most pronounced (at 50% labels, BA 0.89-0.99 vs. HQNN 0.75). On synthetic data, this gap narrows significantly, largely vanishing by the 50% label mark. Overall, the HQNN's value lies in parameter efficiency and a compact inductive bias that shapes its distinct sensitivity profile; this work establishes a rigorous baseline for hybrid quantum models in privacy-preserving radar occupancy sensing.

MPC is widely used in real-time applications, but practical implementations are typically restricted to convex QP formulations to ensure fast and certified execution. Koopman-based MPC enables QP-based control of nonlinear systems by lifting the dynamics to a higher-dimensional linear representation. However, existing approaches rely on single-step EDMD. Consequently, prediction errors may accumulate over long horizons when the EDMD operator is applied recursively. Moreover, the multi-step prediction loss is nonconvex with respect to the single-step EDMD operator, making long-horizon model identification particularly challenging. This paper proposes a multi-step EDMD framework that directly learns the condensed multi-step state-control mapping required for Koopman-MPC, thereby bypassing explicit identification of the lifted system matrices and subsequent model condensation. The resulting identification problem admits a convex least-squares formulation. We further show that the problem decomposes across prediction horizons and state coordinates, enabling parallel computation and row-wise $\ell_1$-regularization for automatic dictionary pruning. A non-asymptotic finite-sample analysis demonstrates that, unlike one-step EDMD, the proposed method avoids error compounding and yields error bounds that depend only on the target multi-step mapping. Numerical examples validate improved long-horizon prediction accuracy and closed-loop performance.

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) holds great promise for enabling event-level sensing, such as behavioral intention prediction (BIP) in autonomous driving, particularly under non-line-of-sight (NLoS) or adverse weather conditions where conventional sensors degrade. However, as a key instance of event-level sensing, ISAC-based BIP remains unexplored. To address this gap, we propose an ISAC-enabled BIP framework and validate its feasibility and effectiveness through extensive simulations. Our framework achieves robust performance in safety-critical scenarios, improving the F1-score by 11.4% over sensor-based baselines in adverse weather, thereby demonstrating ISAC's potential for intelligent event-level sensing.

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

There are 50 billion pieces of litter in the U.S. alone. Grass fields contribute to this problem because picnickers tend to leave trash on the field. We propose building a robot that can autonomously navigate, identify, and pick up trash in parks. To autonomously navigate the park, we used a Spanning Tree Coverage (STC) algorithm to generate a coverage path the robot could follow. To navigate this path, we successfully used Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) GPS, which provides a centimeter-level reading every second. For computer vision, we utilized the ResNet50 Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which detects trash with 94.52% accuracy. For trash pickup, we tested multiple design concepts. We select a new pickup mechanism that specifically targets the trash we encounter on the field. Our solution achieved an overall success rate of 80%, demonstrating that autonomous trash pickup robots on grass fields are a viable solution.

We conceive a novel channel estimation and data detection scheme for OTFS-modulated faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) transmission over doubly selective fading channels, aiming for enhancing the spectral efficiency and Doppler resilience. The delay-Doppler (DD) domain's input-output relationship of OTFS-FTN signaling is derived by employing a root-raised cosine (RRC) shaping filter. More specifically, we design our DD-domain channel estimator for FTN-based pilot transmission, where the pilot symbol interval is lower than that defined by the classic Nyquist criterion. Moreover, we propose a reduced-complexity linear minimum mean square error equalizer, supporting noise whitening, where the FTN-induced inter-symbol interference (ISI) matrix is approximated by a sparse one. Our performance results demonstrate that the proposed OTFS-FTN scheme is capable of enhancing the achievable information rate, while attaining a comparable BER performance to both that of its Nyquist-based OTFS counterpart and to other FTN transmission schemes, which employ the same RRC shaping filter.

We present results and analyses from the third VoicePrivacy Challenge held in 2024, which focuses on advancing voice anonymization technologies. The task was to develop a voice anonymization system for speech data that conceals a speaker's voice identity while preserving linguistic content and emotional state. We provide a systematic overview of the challenge framework, including detailed descriptions of the anonymization task and datasets used for both system development and evaluation. We outline the attack model and objective evaluation metrics for assessing privacy protection (concealing speaker voice identity) and utility (content and emotional state preservation). We describe six baseline anonymization systems and summarize the innovative approaches developed by challenge participants. Finally, we provide key insights and observations to guide the design of future VoicePrivacy challenges and identify promising directions for voice anonymization research.

The paper presents an improved upper bound (achievability result) on the optimal tradeoff between Normalized Delivery Time (NDT) and computation load for distributed computing MapReduce systems in certain ranges of the parameters. The upper bound is based on interference alignment combined with zero-forcing. The paper further provides a lower bound (converse) on the optimal NDT-computation tradeoff that can be achieved when IVAs are partitioned into sub-IVAs, and these sub-IVAs are then transmitted (in an arbitrary form) by a single node, without cooperation among nodes. For appropriate linear functions (e.g., XORs), such non-cooperative schemes can achieve some of the best NDT-computation tradeoff points so far obtained in the literature. However, as our lower bound shows, any non-cooperative scheme achieves a worse NDT-computation tradeoff than our new proposed scheme for certain parameters, thus proving the necessity of cooperative schemes like zero-forcing to attain the optimal NDT-computation tradeoff.

The color of skin lesions is an important diagnostic feature for identifying malignant melanoma and other skin diseases. Typical colors associated with melanocytic lesions include tan, brown, black, red, white, and blue gray. This study introduces a novel feature: the number of colors present in a lesion, which can indicate the severity of disease and help distinguish melanomas from benign lesions. We propose a color histogram analysis method to examine lesion pixel values from three publicly available datasets: PH2, ISIC2016, and Med Node. The PH2 dataset contains ground truth annotations of lesion colors, while ISIC2016 and Med Node do not; our algorithm estimates the ground truth using color histogram analysis based on PH2. We then design and train a 19 layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with residual skip connections to classify lesions into three categories based on the number of colors present. DeepDream visualization is used to interpret features learned by the network, and multiple CNN configurations are tested. The best model achieves a weighted F1 score of 75 percent. LIME is applied to identify important regions influencing model decisions. The results show that the number of colors in a lesion is a significant feature for describing skin conditions, and the proposed CNN with three skip connections demonstrates strong potential for clinical diagnostic support.

Empathetic speech dialogue requires not only understanding linguistic content but also perceiving rich paralinguistic information such as prosody, tone, and emotional intensity for affective understandings. Existing speech-to-speech large language models either rely on ASR transcription or use encoders to extract latent representations, often weakening affective information and contextual coherence in multi-turn dialogues. To address this, we propose ES4R, a framework for speech-based empathetic response generation. Our core innovation lies in explicitly modeling structured affective context before speech encoding, rather than relying on implicit learning by the encoder or explicit emotion supervision. Specifically, we introduce a dual-level attention mechanism to capture turn-level affective states and dialogue-level affective dynamics. The resulting affective representations are then integrated with textual semantics through speech-guided cross-modal attention to generate empathetic responses. For speech output, we employ energy-based strategy selection and style fusion to achieve empathetic speech synthesis. ES4R consistently outperforms strong baselines in both automatic and human evaluations and remains robust across different LLM backbones.

Accurate segmentation of brain tumors is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Deep learning is currently the state-of-the-art for brain tumor segmentation, yet it requires either large datasets or extensive computational resources that are inaccessible in most areas. This makes the problem increasingly difficult: state-of-the-art models use thousands of training cases and vast computational power, where performance drops sharply when either is limited. The top performer in the Brats GLI 2023 competition relied on supercomputers trained on over 92,000 augmented MRI scans using an AMD EPYC 7402 CPU, six NVIDIA RTX 6000 GPUs (48GB VRAM each), and 1024GB of RAM over multiple weeks. To address this, the Karhunen–Loève Expansion (KLE) was implemented as a feature extraction step on downsampled, z-score normalized MRI volumes. Each 240$\times$240$\times$155 multi-modal scan is reduced to four $48^3$ channels and compressed into 32 KL coefficients. The resulting approximate reconstruction enables a residual-based anomaly map, which is upsampled and added as a fifth channel to a compact 3D U-Net. All experiments were run on a consumer workstation (AMD Ryzen 5 7600X CPU, RTX 4060Ti (8GB VRAM), and 64GB RAM while using far fewer training cases. This model achieves post-processed Dice scores of 0.929 (WT), 0.856 (TC), and 0.821 (ET), with HD95 distances of 2.93, 6.78, and 10.35 voxels. These results are significantly better than the winning BraTS 2023 methodology for HD95 distances and WT dice scores. This demonstrates that a KLE-based residual anomaly map can dramatically reduce computational cost and data requirements while retaining state-of-the-art performance.

This paper presents a three-dimensional, hydrodynamics-inspired collision avoidance framework for uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) formations operating in dynamic environments. When moving obstacles enter a UAV's sensing region, they are modeled as three dimensional doublets or ellipsoids that generate local velocity fields, guiding nearby UAVs to execute smooth, collision-free maneuvers without trajectory discontinuities or explicit trajectory replanning. This flow-based approach enables real-time operation and interpretable behavior by leveraging the nature of fluid flow around obstacles via the harmonic properties of Laplace's equation, inherently avoiding local minima common in traditional potential field methods. To establish and maintain coordination among the UAVs, a Virtual Rigid Body (VRB) formation strategy is integrated, ensuring that formation geometry and trajectory tracking are preserved. Simulation results demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of the method for both individual and multi-UAV scenarios with multiple formation geometries encountering moving obstacles. The proposed approach achieves safe, smooth, and computationally efficient avoidance maneuvers suitable for real-time and practical applications.

Robust generalization under distribution shift remains a key challenge for conditional generative modeling: conditional flow-based methods often fit the training conditions well but fail to extrapolate to unseen ones. We introduce SP-FM, a shortest-path flow-matching framework that improves out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization by conditioning both the base distribution and the flow field on the condition. Specifically, SP-FM learns a condition-dependent base distribution parameterized as a flexible, learnable mixture, together with a condition-dependent vector field trained via shortest-path flow matching. Conditioning the base allows the model to adapt its starting distribution across conditions, enabling smooth interpolation and more reliable extrapolation beyond the observed training range. We provide theoretical insights into the resulting conditional transport and show how mixture-conditioned bases enhance robustness under shift. Empirically, SP-FM is effective across heterogeneous domains, including predicting responses to unseen perturbations in single-cell transcriptomics and modeling treatment effects in high-content microscopy–based drug screening. Overall, SP-FM provides a simple yet effective plug-in strategy for improving conditional generative modeling and OOD generalization across diverse domains.

With the growing deployment of small satellites (such as CubeSats, Nanosats, Picosats, and Femtosats) in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) for targeted applications like imaging, communication, data storage, and rendezvous-docking mission, there is increasing attention on orbit maintenance and attitude control. A common approach for active orbit control involves the use of multiple thrusters, which, when properly arranged, can also generate the required torque for attitude control. Starting from a 24-thruster configuration, this paper presents a set of thruster configurations (referred to as a viable configuration group) that enable full six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) control. Further, configuration group that requires minimum total thrust to achieve 6-DOF commands are found among the viable configuration group. One configuration from each of these groups is further evaluated for its attitude control performance through a representative rendezvous-docking mission, demonstrating that even with a reduced thruster count, sufficient maneuverability can be achieved.

This paper presents thorough mathematical modeling, control law development, and simulation of virtual structure formations which are inspired by the characteristics of rigid bodies. The stable constraint forces that establish the rigidity in the formation are synthesized by utilizing d'Alembert's principle of virtual work, constraint sensitivities (Lagrange multipliers) and constraint stabilization using Baumgarte stabilization. The governing equations of motion of a multiagent system are derived via Newton's and Euler's equations to include these constraint forces and to enable inputs regarding the formation as if it were an independent rigid body. The performance of this framework is evaluated under multiple cases including waypoint following missions, and using different number of agents.

Reliable fundamental frequency (F 0) and voicing estimation is essential for neural synthesis, yet many pitch extractors depend on large labeled corpora and degrade under realistic recording artifacts. We propose a lightweight, fully self-supervised framework for joint F 0 estimation and voicing inference, designed for rapid single-instrument training from limited audio. Using transposition-equivariant learning on CQT features, we introduce an EM-style iterative reweighting scheme that uses Shift Cross-Entropy (SCE) consistency as a reliability signal to suppress uninformative noisy/unvoiced frames. The resulting weights provide confidence scores that enable pseudo-labeling for a separate lightweight voicing classifier without manual annotations. Trained on MedleyDB and evaluated on MDB-stem-synth ground truth, our method achieves competitive cross-corpus performance (RPA 95.84, RCA 96.24) and demonstrates cross-instrument generalization.

Spectrum sensing and analysis is crucial for a variety of reasons, including regulatory compliance, interference detection and mitigation, and spectrum resource planning and optimization. Effective, real-time spectrum analysis remains a challenge, stemming from the need to analyse an increasingly complex and dynamic environment with limited resources. The vast amount of data generated from sensing the spectrum at multiple sites requires sophisticated data analysis and processing techniques, which can be technically demanding and expensive. This paper presents a novel, holistic framework developed and deployed at multiple locations across the USA for spectrum analysis and describes the different parts of the end-to-end pipeline. The details of each of the modules of the pipeline, data collection and pre-processing at remote locations, transfer to a centralized location, post-processing analysis, visualization, and long-term storage, are reported. The motivation behind this work is to develop a robust spectrum analysis framework that can help gain greater insights into the spectrum usage across the country and augment additional use cases such as dynamic spectrum sharing.

Spectrum occupancy prediction is a critical enabler for real-time and proactive dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS), as it can provide short-term channel availability information to support more efficient spectrum access decisions in wireless communication systems. Instead of relying on open-source datasets or simulated data, commonly used in the literature, this paper investigates short-horizon spectrum occupancy prediction using mid-band, 24X7 real-world spectrum measurement data collected in the United States. We construct a multi-band channel occupancy dataset through analyzing 61 days of empirical data and formulate a next-minute channel occupancy prediction task across all frequency channels. This study focuses on AI-driven prediction methods, including Random Forest, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network, and compares their performance against a conventional Markov chain-based statistical baseline. Numerical results show that learning-based methods outperform the statistical baseline on dynamic channels, particularly under fixed false-alarm constraints. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of AI-driven spectrum occupancy prediction, indicating that lightweight learning models can effectively support future deployment-oriented DSS systems.

The fundamental mechanism driving MIMO beamforming is the relative phases of signals departing the transmit array and arriving at the receive array. If a propagation channel affects all transmitted signals equally, the relative phases are a function of the directions of departure and arrival, as well as the transmit and receive hardware. In a non-stationary channel, the amplitudes and phases of arriving signals may vary significantly over time, making it infeasible to directly measure the influence of hardware. In this paper, we present a calibration method for achieving indirect measurement and compensation of hardware influences in non-stationary channels. Our method characterizes the patterns of array elements relative to a reference element and estimates these relative patterns, termed residual surfaces, using a Slepian spherical harmonic basis. Using simulations, we demonstrate that our calibration method achieves beamforming gains that closely match theoretical optimums. Our results also show a reduction in the error in estimating the target direction, lower side lobes, and improve null-steering capabilities.

As the demand of wireless communication continues to rise, the radio spectrum (a finite resource) requires increasingly efficient utilization. This trend is driving the evolution from static, stand-alone spectrum allocation toward spectrum sharing and dynamic spectrum sharing. A critical element of this transition is spectrum sensing, which facilitates informed decision-making in shared environments. Previous studies on spectrum sensing and cognitive radio have been largely limited to individual sensors or small sensor groups. In this work, a large-scale spectrum sensing network (LarS-Net) is designed in a cost-effective manner. Spectrum sensors are either co-located with base stations (BSs) to share the tower, backhaul, and power infrastructure, or integrated directly into BSs as a new feature leveraging active BS antenna systems. As an example incumbent system, fixed service microwave link operating in the lower-7 GHz band is investigated. This band is a primary candidate for 6G, being considered by the WRC-23, ITU, and FCC. Based on Monte Carlo simulations, we determine the minimum subset of BSs equipped with sensing capability to guarantee a target incumbent detection probability. The simulations account for various sensor antenna configurations, propagation channel models, and duty cycles for both incumbent transmissions and sensing operations. Building on this framework, we introduce three network-level sensing performance metrics: Emission Detection Probability (EDP), Temporal Detection Probability (TDP), and Temporal Mis-detection Probability (TMP), which jointly capture spatial coverage, temporal detectability, and multi-node diversity effects. Using these metrics, we analyze the impact of LarS-Net inter-site distance, noise uncertainty, and sensing duty-cycle on large-scale sensing performance.

User-side reconfigurable intelligent surface (US-RIS)-aided communication has recently emerged as a promising solution to overcome the high hardware cost and physical size limitations of large-scale user side antenna arrays. This letter proposes, for the first time, a framework that realizes sparsity in multilayer US-RIS using two strategies, namely element-wise sparsity and geometric sparsity. The element-wise approach distributes a limited number of active elements irregularly across multiple layers, thereby exploiting additional spatial degrees of freedom and boosting the achievable rate. For further performance enhancement, a novel foldable RIS architecture leveraging geometric sparsity is proposed, achieving additional gains by optimizing the folding topology of its multilayer structure. Simulation results show that the proposed sparse architectures provide consistently higher achievable rates than existing designs.

This paper proposes a novel technique for rejecting partial-in-band inter-cell interference (ICI) in ultrawideband communication systems. We present the design of an end-to-end wireless autoencoder architecture that jointly optimizes the transmitter and receiver encoding/decoding in the Walsh domain to mitigate interference from coexisting narrower-band 5G base stations. By exploiting the orthogonality and self-inverse properties of Walsh functions, the system distributes and learns to encode bit-words across parallel Walsh branches. Through analytical modeling and simulation, we characterize how 5G CPOFDM interference maps into the Walsh domain and identify optimal ratios of transmission frequencies and sampling rate where the end-to-end autoencoder achieves the highest rejection. Experimental results show that the proposed autoencoder achieves up to 12 dB of ICI rejection while maintaining a low block error rate (BLER) for the same baseline channel noise, i.e., baseline Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) without the interference.

In a time-slotted system, we study the problem of scheduling multipartite entanglement requests in a quantum switch with a finite number of quantum memory registers. Specifically, we consider probabilistic link-level entanglement (LLE) generation for each user, probabilistic entanglement swapping, and one-slot decoherence. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheduling policies, we introduce a novel age-based metric, coined age of entanglement establishment (AoEE). We consider two families of low-complexity policies for which we obtain closed-form expressions for their corresponding AoEE performance. Optimizing over each family, we obtain two policies. Further, we propose one more low-complexity policy and provide its performance guarantee. Finally, we numerically compare the performance of the proposed policies.