Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD
Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for Embedding Refinement in Personalized Speech Enhancement
Thomas Serre, Mathieu Fontaine, Éric Benhaim et al. (+1 more)
Personalized
speech enhancement (PSE) has shown convincing results when it comes to extracting a known target voice among interfering ones. The corresponding systems usually incorporate a representation of the target voice within the enhancement system, which is extracted from an enrollment clip of the target voice with upstream models. Those models are generally heavy as the speaker
embedding's quality directly affects PSE performances. Yet,
embeddings generated beforehand cannot account for the variations of the target voice during inference time. In this paper, we propose to perform on-thefly refinement of the speaker
embedding using a tiny speaker encoder. We first introduce a novel contrastive knowledge
distillation methodology in order to train a 150k-parameter encoder from complex
embeddings. We then use this encoder within the enhancement system during inference and show that the proposed method greatly improves PSE performances while maintaining a low computational load.
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All authors Thomas Serre, Mathieu Fontaine, Éric Benhaim, Slim Essid
Image and Video Processing
A Machine Vision Approach to Preliminary Skin Lesion Assessments
Ali Khreis, Ro'Yah Radaideh and Quinn McGill
Early detection of malignant skin lesions is critical for improving patient outcomes in aggressive, metastatic skin cancers. This study evaluates a comprehensive system for preliminary skin lesion assessment that combines the clinically established ABCD rule of dermoscopy (analyzing Asymmetry, Borders, Color, and Dermoscopic Structures) with machine learning classification. Using a 1,000-image subset of the HAM10000
dataset, the system implements an automated, rule-based pipeline to compute a Total Dermoscopy Score (TDS) for each lesion. This handcrafted approach is compared against various machine learning solutions, including traditional classifiers (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and SVM) and deep learning models. While the rule-based system provides high clinical interpretability, results indicate a performance bottleneck when reducing complex morphology to five numerical features. Experimental findings show that transfer learning with EfficientNet-B0 failed significantly due to domain shift between natural and medical images. In contrast, a custom three-layer Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained from scratch achieved 78.5% accuracy and 86.5% recall on median-filtered images, representing a 19-point accuracy improvement over traditional methods. The results demonstrate that direct pixel-level learning captures diagnostic patterns beyond handcrafted features and that purpose-built lightweight architectures can outperform large pretrained models for small, domain-specific medical
datasets.
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Signal Processing
Applicability and Limitation Analysis of PMU Data and Phasor Concept for Low- and High- Frequency Oscillations
Bowen Ou, Bin Wang, Slava Maslennikov et al. (+2 more)
Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) convert high-speed waveform data into low-speed phasor data, which are fundamental to wide-area monitoring and control in power systems, with oscillation detection and localization among their most prominent applications. However, representing electrical waveform signals with oscillations using PMU phasors is effective only for low-frequency oscillations. This paper investigates the root causes of this limitation, focusing on errors introduced by Discrete
Fourier Transform (DFT)-based signal processing, in addition to the attenuation effects of anti-aliasing filters, and the impact of low reporting rates. To better represent and estimate waveform signals with oscillations, we propose a more general signal model and a multi-step estimation method that leverages one-cycle DFT, the
Matrix Pencil Method, and the Least Squares Method. Numerical experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed signal model and estimation method. Furthermore, this paper reveals that the phasor concept, let alone PMU phasors, can become invalid for waveform signals with high-frequency oscillations characterized by asymmetric sub- and super-synchronous components. These findings highlight the fundamental limitations of PMU data and phasor concept, and emphasize the need to rely on waveform data for analyzing high-frequency oscillations in modern power systems.
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All authors Bowen Ou, Bin Wang, Slava Maslennikov, Hanchao Liu, Jim Follum
Signal Processing
Achievable Rate Optimization for Large Flexible Intelligent Metasurface Assisted Downlink MISO under Statistical CSI
Ling He, Vaibhav Kumar, Anastasios Papazafeiropoulos et al. (+3 more)
The integration of electromagnetic metasurfaces into wireless communications enables intelligent control of the propagation environment. Recently, flexible intelligent metasurfaces (FIMs) have evolved beyond conventional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), enabling three-dimensional surface deformation for adaptive wave manipulation. However, most existing FIM-aided system designs assume perfect instantaneous channel state information (CSI), which is impractical in large-scale networks due to the high training overhead and complicated channel estimation. To overcome this limitation, we propose a robust statistical-CSI-based optimization framework for downlink multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems with FIM-assisted transmitters. A block coordinate ascent (BCA)-based iterative
algorithm is developed to jointly optimize power allocation and FIM morphing, maximizing the average achievable sum rate. Simulation results show that the proposed statistical-CSI-driven FIM design significantly outperforms conventional rigid
antenna arrays (RAAs), validating its effectiveness and practicality.
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All authors Ling He, Vaibhav Kumar, Anastasios Papazafeiropoulos, Miaowen Wen, Le-Nam Tran, Marwa Chafii
Audio and Speech Processing
DynamicSound simulator for simulating moving sources and microphone arrays
Luca Barbisan, Marco Levorato and Fabrizio Riente
Developing
algorithms for sound classification, detection, and localization requires large amounts of flexible and realistic audio data, especially when leveraging modern machine learning and beamforming techniques. However, most existing acoustic simulators are tailored for indoor environments and are limited to static sound sources, making them unsuitable for scenarios involving moving sources, moving microphones, or long-distance propagation. This paper presents DynamicSound an open-source acoustic simulation framework for generating multichannel audio from one or more sound sources with the possibility to move them continuously in three-dimensional space and recorded by arbitrarily configured microphone arrays. The proposed model explicitly accounts for finite sound propagation delays, Doppler effects, distance-dependent attenuation, air absorption, and first-order reflections from planar surfaces, yielding temporally consistent spatial audio signals. Unlike conventional mono or stereo simulators, the proposed system synthesizes audio for an arbitrary number of virtual microphones, accurately reproducing inter-microphone time delays, level differences, and spectral coloration induced by the environment. Comparative evaluations with existing open-source tools demonstrate that the generated signals preserve high spatial fidelity across varying source positions and acoustic conditions. By enabling the generation of realistic multichannel audio under controlled and repeatable conditions, the proposed open framework provides a flexible and reproducible tool for the development, training, and evaluation of modern spatial audio and sound-source localization
algorithms.
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Signal Processing
ISAC-over-NTN: HAPS-UAV Framework for Post-Disaster Responsive 6G Networks
Berk Ciloglu, Ozgun Ersoy, Metin Ozturk et al. (+1 more)
In disaster scenarios, ensuring both reliable communication and situational awareness becomes a critical challenge due to the partial or complete collapse of terrestrial networks. This paper proposes an integrated sensing and communication (
ISAC) over non-terrestrial networks (NTN) architecture referred to as
ISAC-over-NTN that integrates multiple uncrewed aerial vehicles (
UAVs) and a high-altitude platform station (HAPS) to maintain resilient and reliable network operations in post-disaster conditions. We aim to achieve two main objectives: i) provide a reliable communication infrastructure, thereby ensuring the continuity of search-and-rescue activities and connecting people to their loved ones, and ii) detect users, such as those trapped under rubble or those who are mobile, using a Doppler-based mobility detection model. We employ an innovative beamforming method that simultaneously transmits data and detects Doppler-based mobility by integrating multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-
MIMO) communication and monostatic sensing within the same transmission chain. The results show that the proposed framework maintains reliable connectivity and achieves high detection accuracy of users in critical locations, reaching 90% motion detection sensitivity and 88% detection accuracy.
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All authors Berk Ciloglu, Ozgun Ersoy, Metin Ozturk, Ali Gorcin
Image and Video Processing
OpenVision 3: A Family of Unified Visual Encoder for Both Understanding and Generation
Letian Zhang, Sucheng Ren, Yanqing Liu et al. (+9 more)
This paper presents a family of advanced
vision encoder, named OpenVision 3, that learns a single, unified visual representation that can serve both image understanding and image generation. Our core architecture is simple: we feed VAE-compressed image latents to a ViT encoder and train its output to support two complementary roles. First, the encoder output is passed to the ViT-VAE decoder to reconstruct the original image, encouraging the representation to capture generative structure. Second, the same representation is optimized with contrastive learning and image-captioning objectives, strengthening semantic features. By jointly optimizing reconstruction- and semantics-driven signals in a shared latent space, the encoder learns representations that synergize and generalize well across both regimes. We validate this unified design through extensive downstream evaluations with the encoder frozen. For generation, we test it under the RAE framework: ours substantially surpasses the standard CLIP-based encoder (e.g., gFID: 1.87 vs. 2.54 on ImageNet). For
multimodal understanding, we plug the encoder into the LLaVA-1.5 and LLaVA-NeXT framework: it performs comparably with a standard CLIP
vision encoder (e.g., 63.3 vs. 61.2 on SeedBench, and 59.2 vs. 58.1 on GQA). We provide empirical evidence that generation and understanding are mutually beneficial in our architecture, while further underscoring the critical role of the VAE latent space. We hope this work can spur future research on unified modeling.
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All authors Letian Zhang, Sucheng Ren, Yanqing Liu, Xianhang Li, Zeyu Wang, Yuyin Zhou, Huaxiu Yao, Zeyu Zheng, Weili Nie, Guilin Liu, Zhiding Yu, Cihang Xie
Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV
Aligned Stable Inpainting: Mitigating Unwanted Object Insertion and Preserving Color Consistency
Yikai Wang, Junqiu Yu, Chenjie Cao et al. (+2 more)
Generative image inpainting can produce realistic results even with large, irregular masks, but existing methods still suffer from two common problems: (1) Unwanted object insertion: hallucinate artifacts that do not match the surrounding context. (2) Color inconsistency: noticeable color shifts that lead to smeared textures. We analyze the causes of these issues and propose Aligned Stable inpainting with UnKnown Areas prior (ASUKA), a post-hoc framework for pre-trained inpainting models. To reduce unwanted object insertion, we use reconstruction-based priors to guide the generative model, suppressing hallucinated objects while preserving generative flexibility. To address color inconsistency, we design a specialized VAE decoder that formulates latent-to-image decoding as a local harmonization task. We implement ASUKA on both U-Net-based and DiT-based inpainting models with lightweight modifications. Experiments on Places2 and MISATO, our proposed
benchmark, show that ASUKA effectively suppresses object
hallucination and improves color consistency, outperforming existing
diffusion- and rectified flow-based inpainting methods. The
dataset, models, and code will be released on GitHub.
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All authors Yikai Wang, Junqiu Yu, Chenjie Cao, Xiangyang Xue, Yanwei Fu
Image and Video Processing
High-Fidelity 3D Tooth Reconstruction by Fusing Intraoral Scans and CBCT Data via a Deep Implicit Representation
Yi Zhu, Razmig Kechichian, Raphaël Richert et al. (+2 more)
High-fidelity 3D tooth models are essential for digital dentistry, but must capture both the detailed crown and the complete root. Clinical imaging modalities are limited: Cone-Beam Computed
Tomography (CBCT) captures the root but has a noisy, low-resolution crown, while Intraoral Scanners (IOS) provide a high-fidelity crown but no root information. A naive fusion of these sources results in unnatural seams and artifacts. We propose a novel, fully-automated pipeline that fuses CBCT and IOS data using a deep implicit representation. Our method first segments and robustly registers the tooth instances, then creates a hybrid proxy mesh combining the IOS crown and the CBCT root. The core of our approach is to use this noisy proxy to guide a class-specific DeepSDF network. This optimization process projects the input onto a learned
manifold of ideal tooth shapes, generating a seamless, watertight, and anatomically coherent model. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations show our method uniquely preserves both the high-fidelity crown from IOS and the patient-specific root morphology from CBCT, overcoming the limitations of each modality and naive stitching.
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All authors Yi Zhu, Razmig Kechichian, Raphaël Richert, Satoshi Ikehata, Sébastien Valette
Image and Video Processing
Q-Probe: Scaling Image Quality Assessment to High Resolution via Context-Aware Agentic Probing
Xiang Li, Xueheng Li, Yu Wang et al. (+3 more)
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has empowered
Multimodal Large
Language Models (MLLMs) to achieve superior human preference
alignment in Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, existing RL-based IQA models typically rely on coarse-grained global views, failing to capture subtle local degradations in high-resolution scenarios. While emerging "Thinking with Images" paradigms enable multi-scale visual perception via zoom-in mechanisms, their direct adaptation to IQA induces spurious "cropping-implies-degradation" biases and misinterprets natural depth-of-field as artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose Q-Probe, the first agentic IQA framework designed to scale IQA to high resolution via context-aware probing. First, we construct Vista-Bench, a pioneering
benchmark tailored for fine-grained local degradation analysis in high-resolution IQA settings. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage training paradigm that progressively aligns the model with human preferences, while simultaneously eliminating causal bias through a novel context-aware cropping strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Probe achieves state-of-the-art performance in high-resolution settings while maintaining superior efficacy across resolution scales.
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All authors Xiang Li, Xueheng Li, Yu Wang, Xuanhua He, Zhangchi Hu, Chengjun Xie
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Preparation and Motion Study of Magnetically Driven Micro Soft Robot Mimicking the Cownose Ray
Jiaqing Chang, Song Gao, Chaowei Dong et al. (+2 more)
In narrow, unstructured
underwater environments such as environmental monitoring and minimally invasive medical procedures, micro soft
robots exhibit unique advantages due to their flexible movement capabilities and small size. At the same time, applying bionic technology to the structural design of micro soft
robots can significantly improve their swimming performance. However, limited by their miniaturization, these
robots are difficult to power internally and usually adopt a wireless power supply method. This study designs and fabricates a magnetically responsive, cownose ray-inspired micro soft
robot based on the swimming principle of the cownose ray. The
robot is made of a certain proportion of NdFeB and PDMS. Then, a three-dimensional Helmholtz coil is used to generate an oscillating harmonic
magnetic field to conduct swimming experiments on the
robot, exploring the influence of
magnetic field parameters on the
robot's swimming performance. The experimental results show that the swimming speed is the fastest at B = 5 mT and f = 11 Hz, reaching 5.25 mm/s, which is about 0.5 body lengths per second. In addition, by adjusting the current direction and frequency of the coil, the
robot can perform different swimming modes such as straight swimming, turning swimming, and directional swimming. By employing a stepwise adjustment method, the impact of response errors on the
robot's trajectory can be effectively reduced. This study demonstrates a method for magnetically driven micro soft
robots, laying a foundation for the application of wireless-driven
robots in
underwater narrow spaces.
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All authors Jiaqing Chang, Song Gao, Chaowei Dong, zhaobang Li, Yang Liu
Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD
WeDefense: A Toolkit to Defend Against Fake Audio
Lin Zhang, Johan Rohdin, Xin Wang et al. (+8 more)
The advances in generative AI have enabled the creation of synthetic audio which is perceptually indistinguishable from real, genuine audio. Although this
stellar progress enables many positive applications, it also raises risks of misuse, such as for impersonation, disinformation and fraud. Despite a growing number of open-source fake audio detection codes released through numerous challenges and initiatives, most are tailored to specific competitions,
datasets or models. A standardized and unified toolkit that supports the fair benchmarking and comparison of competing solutions with not just common databases, protocols, metrics, but also a shared codebase, is missing. To address this, we propose WeDefense, the first open-source toolkit to support both fake audio detection and localization. Beyond model training, WeDefense emphasizes critical yet often overlooked components: flexible input and augmentation, calibration, score fusion, standardized evaluation metrics, and analysis tools for deeper understanding and interpretation. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/zlin0/wedefense with interactive demos for fake audio detection and localization.
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All authors Lin Zhang, Johan Rohdin, Xin Wang, Junyi Peng, Tianchi Liu, You Zhang, Hieu-Thi Luong, Shuai Wang, Chengdong Liang, Anna Silnova, Nicholas Evans
Systems and Control
TTCBF: A Truncated Taylor Control Barrier Function for High-Order Safety Constraints
Jianye Xu and Bassam Alrifaee
Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) enforce safety by rendering a prescribed safe set forward invariant. However, standard CBFs are limited to safety constraints with relative degree one, while High-Order CBF (HOCBF) methods address higher relative degree at the cost of introducing a chain of auxiliary functions and multiple class K functions whose tuning scales with the relative degree. In this paper, we introduce a Truncated Taylor Control Barrier Function (TTCBF), which generalizes standard discrete-time CBFs to consider high-order safety constraints and requires only one class K function, independent of the relative degree. We also propose an adaptive variant, adaptive TTCBF (aTTCBF), that optimizes an online gain on the class K function to improve adaptability, while requiring fewer control design parameters than existing adaptive HOCBF variants. Numerical experiments in a relative-degree-six spring-mass system and a cluttered corridor
navigation validate the above theoretical findings.
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Signal Processing
Weather Estimation for Integrated Sensing and Communication
Victoria Palhares, Artjom Grudnitsky and Silvio Mandelli
One of the key features of sixth-generation (6G) mobile communications will be integrated sensing and communication (
ISAC). While the main goal of
ISAC in standardization efforts is to detect objects, the byproducts of radar operations can be used to enable new services in 6G, such as weather sensing. Even though weather radars are the most prominent technology for weather detection and monitoring, they are expensive and usually neglect areas in close vicinity. To this end, we propose reusing the dense deployment of 6G base stations for weather sensing purposes by detecting and estimating weather conditions. We implement both a classifier and a regressor as a convolutional neural network trained across measurements with varying precipitation rates and wind speeds. We implement our approach in an
ISAC proof-of-concept and conduct a multi-week experiment campaign. Experimental results show that we are able to jointly and accurately classify weather conditions with accuracies of 99.38% and 98.99% for precipitation rate and wind speed, respectively. For estimation, we obtain mean absolute errors of 1.2 mm/h and 1.5 km/h, for precipitation rate and wind speed, respectively. These findings indicate that weather sensing services can be reliably deployed in 6G
ISAC networks, broadening their service portfolio and boosting their
market value.
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Systems and Control
Stochastic EMS for Optimal 24/7 Carbon-Free Energy Operations
Natanon Tongamrak, Kannapha Amaruchkul, Wijarn Wangdee et al. (+1 more)
This paper proposes a two-stage
stochastic optimization formulation to determine optimal operation and procurement plans for achieving a 24/7 carbon-free energy (CFE) compliance at minimized cost. The system in consideration follows primary energy technologies in Thailand including
solar power, battery storage, and a diverse portfolio of renewable and carbon-based energy procurement sources. Unlike existing literature focused on long-term planning, this study addresses near real-time operations using a 15-minute resolution. A novel feature of the formulation is the explicit treatment of CFE compliance as a model parameter, enabling flexible targets such as a minimum percentage of hourly matching or a required number of carbon-free days within a multi-day horizon. The mixed-integer linear programming formulation accounts for uncertainties in load and
solar generation by integrating deep learning-based
forecasting within a receding horizon framework. By optimizing battery profiles and multi-source procurement simultaneously, the proposed system provides a feasible pathway for transitioning to carbon-free operations in emerging energy
markets.
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All authors Natanon Tongamrak, Kannapha Amaruchkul, Wijarn Wangdee, Jitkomut Songsiri
Signal Processing
Sparse Sensor Arrays for Active Sensing: Models, Configurations and Applications
Robin Rajamäki and Visa Koivunen
This chapter focuses on active sensing using sparse arrays. In active sensing applications, such as radar, sonar, wireless communications, and medical ultrasound, a collection of sensors probes the environment by emitting self-generated energy. A key benefit of such active multi-sensor arrays is their ability to focus and steer energy in desired directions by beamforming on transmit. Sparse sensor arrays offer several advantages over conventional uniform arrays, including improved resolution using fewer physical sensors and the capability to identify more scatterers than sensors. This is facilitated by the effective transmit-receive virtual array known as the sum co-array, which can have many more virtual sensors than the number of physical transmit or receive sensors. Herein, we focus on the design of low-redundancy sparse array configurations and on employing transmit-receive (Tx-Rx) beamforming using sparse arrays. We discuss the optimal, but computationally intractable Minimum-redundancy array, and a scalable symmetric array framework, which extends many well-known passive sparse array geometries to the active case. We also examine mitigating side lobes arising from spatial undersampling by a synthetic beamforming method known as image addition. We briefly present approaches for finding the physical beamforming weights synthesizing a desired Tx-Rx beampattern, and consider related spatio-temporal trade-offs. We conclude by discussing selected applications of sparse arrays in active sensing.
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Image and Video Processing
Vision Models for Medical Imaging: A Hybrid Approach for PCOS Detection from Ultrasound Scans
Md Mahmudul Hoque, Md Mehedi Hassain, Muntakimur Rahaman et al. (+3 more)
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) is the most familiar endocrine illness in women of reproductive age. Many Bangladeshi women suffer from PCOS disease in their older age. The aim of our research is to identify effective
vision-based medical image analysis techniques and evaluate hybrid models for the accurate detection of PCOS. We introduced two novel hybrid models combining convolutional and
transformer-based approaches. The training and testing data were organized into two categories: "infected" (PCOS-positive) and "noninfected" (healthy ovaries). In the initial stage, our first hybrid model, 'DenConST' (integrating DenseNet121, Swin
Transformer, and ConvNeXt), achieved 85.69% accuracy. The final optimized model, 'DenConREST' (incorporating Swin
Transformer, ConvNeXt, DenseNet121, ResNet18, and EfficientNetV2), demonstrated superior performance with 98.23% accuracy. Among all evaluated models, DenConREST showed the best performance. This research highlights an efficient solution for PCOS detection from ultrasound images, significantly improving diagnostic accuracy while reducing detection errors.
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All authors Md Mahmudul Hoque, Md Mehedi Hassain, Muntakimur Rahaman, Md. Towhidul Islam, Shaista Rani, Md Sharif Mollah
Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Field-Space Autoencoder for Scalable Climate Emulators
Johannes Meuer, Maximilian Witte, Étiénne Plésiat et al. (+2 more)
Kilometer-scale Earth system models are essential for capturing local
climate change. However, these models are computationally expensive and produce petabyte-scale outputs, which limits their utility for applications such as probabilistic risk assessment. Here, we present the Field-Space Autoencoder, a scalable
climate emulation framework based on a spherical compression model that overcomes these challenges. By utilizing Field-Space
Attention, the model efficiently operates on native
climate model output and therefore avoids
geometric distortions caused by forcing spherical data onto Euclidean grids. This approach preserves physical structures significantly better than convolutional baselines. By producing a structured compressed field, it serves as a good baseline for downstream generative emulation. In addition, the model can perform zero-shot super-resolution that maps low-resolution large ensembles and scarce high-resolution data into a shared representation. We train a generative
diffusion model on these compressed fields. The model can simultaneously learn internal variability from abundant low-resolution data and fine-scale physics from sparse high-resolution data. Our work bridges the gap between the high volume of low-resolution ensemble statistics and the scarcity of high-resolution physical detail.
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All authors Johannes Meuer, Maximilian Witte, Étiénne Plésiat, Thomas Ludwig, Christopher Kadow
Systems and Control
Instantaneous Frequency in Power Systems using the Teager-Kaiser Energy Operator
A. Vaca, J. Gutierrez Florensa and F. Milano
This letter develops an instantaneous-frequency (IF) local
estimator calculated with the complex Teager–Kaiser energy operator (CTKEO) and the dynamic-signal identity. The contribution is a novel CTKEO-based IF expression that makes the envelope-
curvature terms explicit, thus correcting the bias that affects conventional
estimators used in power systems. The
estimator aligns with complex-frequency (CF) kinematics and admits a
geometric interpretation (
curvature) without phase unwrapping. This yields an accurate local frequency estimate in operating conditions where magnitude variations contribute non-negligibly to the signal dynamics. Tests on field measurements illustrate the practical behavior of the proposed approach and its consistency with a
geometric-frequency
benchmark.
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Signal Processing
Neural Tracking of Sustained Attention, Attention Switching, and Natural Conversation in Audiovisual Environments using Mobile EEG
Johanna Wilroth, Oskar Keding, Martin A. Skoglund et al. (+3 more)
Everyday communication is dynamic and multisensory, often involving shifting
attention, overlapping
speech and visual cues. Yet, most neural
attention tracking studies are still limited to highly controlled lab settings, using clean, often audio-only stimuli and requiring sustained
attention to a single talker. This work addresses that gap by introducing a novel
dataset from 24 normal-hearing participants. We used a mobile electroencephalography (
EEG) system (44 scalp electrodes and 20 cEEGrid electrodes) in an audiovisual (AV) paradigm with three conditions: sustained
attention to a single talker in a two-talker environment,
attention switching between two talkers, and unscripted two-talker conversations with a competing single talker. Analysis included temporal response functions (TRFs) modeling, optimal lag analysis, selective
attention classification with decision windows ranging from 1.1s to 35s, and comparisons of TRFs for
attention to AV conversations versus side audio-only talkers. Key findings show significant differences in the
attention-related P2-peak between attended and ignored
speech across conditions for scalp
EEG. No significant change in performance between switching and sustained
attention suggests robustness for
attention switches. Optimal lag analysis revealed narrower peak for conversation compared to single-talker AV stimuli, reflecting the additional complexity of multi-talker processing. Classification of selective
attention was consistently above chance (55-70% accuracy) for scalp
EEG, while cEEGrid data yielded lower correlations, highlighting the need for further methodological improvements. These results demonstrate that mobile
EEG can reliably track selective
attention in dynamic, multisensory listening scenarios and provide guidance for designing future AV paradigms and real-world
attention tracking applications.
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All authors Johanna Wilroth, Oskar Keding, Martin A. Skoglund, Maria Sandsten, Martin Enqvist, Emina Alickovic
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.AI
The Responsibility Vacuum: Organizational Failure in Scaled Agent Systems
Oleg Romanchuk and Roman Bondar
Modern CI/CD pipelines integrating
agent-generated code exhibit a structural failure in responsibility attribution. Decisions are executed through formally correct approval processes, yet no entity possesses both the authority to approve those decisions and the epistemic capacity to meaningfully understand their basis. We define this condition as responsibility
vacuum: a state in which decisions occur, but responsibility cannot be attributed because authority and verification capacity do not coincide. We show that this is not a process deviation or technical defect, but a structural property of deployments where decision generation throughput exceeds bounded human verification capacity. We identify a scaling limit under standard deployment assumptions, including parallel
agent generation, CI-based validation, and individualized human approval gates. Beyond a throughput threshold, verification ceases to function as a decision criterion and is replaced by ritualized approval based on proxy signals. Personalized responsibility becomes structurally unattainable in this regime. We further characterize a CI amplification dynamic, whereby increasing automated validation coverage raises proxy signal density without restoring human capacity. Under fixed time and
attention constraints, this accelerates cognitive offloading in the broad sense and widens the gap between formal approval and epistemic understanding. Additional automation therefore amplifies, rather than mitigates, the responsibility
vacuum. We conclude that unless organizations explicitly redesign decision boundaries or reassign responsibility away from individual decisions toward batch- or system-level ownership, responsibility
vacuum remains an invisible but persistent failure mode in scaled
agent deployments.
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Systems and Control
Electrical Design of a Clean Offshore Heat and Power (CleanOFF) Hub
Maiken Borud Omtveit, Qian Long, Valentin Chabaud et al. (+3 more)
This paper presents an innovative offshore solution where oil & gas platform clusters are powered by a wind farm and a hydrogen hub. The results show a feasible off-grid design as an alternative to conventional electrification solutions. To address the challenges of design and operation of such a system, a power system model of the equipment and control was developed in a power system simulator called Process Power Simulator (PPSim). Power fluctuations in the wind farm are modelled using a state-of-the-art method encompassing
turbulence and wakes. Various operation scenarios were used to evaluate the system design and find the right equipment size. An expensive component to over dimension is the battery energy storage system (BESS). The BESS power rating and energy capacity were found by running a combination of scenarios with extreme and natural wind variations, and contingencies. The control strategy and ramp rates of electrolyzers have significant impact on both system performance and design. A ramp rate in the order of seconds as opposed to minutes will decrease the required BESS size by 60-70%. Choosing synchronized control of the electrolyzers can further reduce the BESS size by 15-20%. The simulations also revealed challenges to achieve self-sufficiency of hydrogen and potential design improvements are suggested.
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All authors Maiken Borud Omtveit, Qian Long, Valentin Chabaud, Marte Ruud-Olsen, Steinar Halsne, Tor-Christian Ystgaard
Signal Processing
Physical Layer Security in Massive MIMO: Challenges and Open Research Directions Against Passive Eavesdroppers
Nipun Agarwal
Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (
MIMO) has become a crucial enabling technology for 5G and beyond, providing previously unheard-of increases in energy and spectrum efficiency. It is still difficult to guarantee secure communication in these systems, particularly when it comes to passive eavesdroppers whose base station is unaware of their channel state information. By taking advantage of the inherent randomness of wireless channels, Physical Layer Security (PLS) offers a promising paradigm; however, its efficacy in massive
MIMO is heavily reliant on resource allocation and transmission strategies. In this work, the performance of secure transmission schemes, such as Maximum Ratio Transmission (MRT), Zero-Forcing (ZF), and Artificial Noise (AN)-aided beamforming, is examined when passive eavesdroppers are present. This work will use extensive Monte Carlo simulations to assess important performance metrics such as energy efficiency, secrecy outage probability, and secrecy sum rate under different system parameters (e.g., number of
antennas, Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), power allocation). The results aim to provide comparative insight into the strengths and limitations of different PLS strategies and to highlight open research directions to design scalable, energy-efficient, and robust secure transmission techniques in future 6G networks.
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Signal Processing
Alternative Shapes of Modulation Schemes Detailed Exposition and Simulation Methodology
Nipun Agarwal
Modulation constellation design is a core challenge in digital communications, especially under stringent demands on spectral efficiency, robustness, and energy consumption. Classical schemes like PSK and QAM, while analytically tractable, often lose optimality under realistic channels and nonlinear hardware constraints. This paper provides a unified study of constellation design from
geometric, probabilistic, optimization, and machine learning perspectives, focusing on symbol error rate (SER), fading robustness, peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR), and energy efficiency. We evaluate classical,
lattice-based, asymmetric, probabilistically shaped, Golden Angle, heuristic-optimized, and machine learning assisted constellations under AWGN and Rayleigh fading via large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. Incorporating PAPR-aware and power amplifier models reveals that SER-optimal designs are not always energy-optimal; small SER trade-offs can yield substantial energy savings. Machine learning approaches offer flexible joint optimization of reliability, robustness, and energy efficiency by
embedding channel and hardware constraints into the learning objective.
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Image and Video Processing
Filtered 2D Contour-Based Reconstruction of 3D STL Model from CT-DICOM Images
K.Punnam Chandar and Y.Ravi Kumar
Reconstructing a 3D Stereo-lithography (STL) Model from 2D Contours of scanned structure in Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) images is crucial to understand the geometry and deformity. Computed
Tomography (CT) images are processed to enhance the contrast, reduce the noise followed by smoothing. The processed CT images are segmented using thresholding technique. 2D contour data points are extracted from segmented CT images and are used to construct 3D STL Models. The 2D contour data points may contain outliers as a result of
segmentation of low resolution images and the geometry of the constructed 3D structure deviate from the actual. To cope with the imperfections in
segmentation process, in this work we propose to use filtered 2D contour data points to reconstruct 3D STL Model. The filtered 2D contour points of each image are delaunay triangulated and joined layer-by-layer to reconstruct the 3D STL model. The 3D STL Model reconstruction is verified on i) 2D Data points of basic shapes and ii) Region of Interest (ROI) of human pelvic bone and are presented as case studies. The 3D STL model constructed from 2D contour data points of ROI of segmented pelvic bone with and without filtering are presented. The 3D STL model reconstructed from filtered 2D data points improved the geometry of model compared to the model reconstructed without filtering 2D data points.
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Systems and Control
Stealthy bias injection attack detection based on Kullback-Leibler divergence in noisy linear systems
Jingwei Dong and André M. H. Teixeira
This paper studies the design of observer gains to enhance the detectability of stealthy bias injection attacks (BIAs) in linear systems driven by Gaussian noise, where adversaries compromise a subset of sensors and exploit system dynamics and noise to remain stealthy. We formulate the observer-gain design as a max-min optimization problem that enhances the detectability of the least detectable BIAs, with detectability measured by the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) subject to a prescribed attack impact. To reduce the computational complexity of the derived non-convex design problem, we consider attack onset, one-step, and steady-state detectability. We show that the Kalman filter is optimal at attack onset regardless of the subset of attacked sensors. For the one-step and steady-state cases, the observer gain design problems are approximated by bi-convex optimization problems, which can be efficiently solved using alternating optimization (AO) and alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Moreover, more tractable linear
matrix inequality (LMI) relaxations are developed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed stealth-aware detection framework is demonstrated through an application to a thermal system.
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Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD
VCNAC: A Variable-Channel Neural Audio Codec for Mono, Stereo, and Surround Sound
Florian Grötschla, Arunasish Sen, Alessandro Lombardi et al. (+2 more)
We present VCNAC, a variable channel neural audio codec. Our approach features a single encoder and decoder parametrization that enables native inference for different channel setups, from mono
speech to cinematic 5.1 channel surround audio. Channel compatibility objectives ensure that multi-channel content maintains perceptual quality when decoded to fewer channels. The shared representation enables training of generative
language models on a single set of codebooks while supporting inference-time scalability across modalities and channel configurations. Evaluation using objective spatial audio metrics and subjective listening tests demonstrates that our unified approach maintains high reconstruction quality across mono, stereo, and surround audio configurations.
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All authors Florian Grötschla, Arunasish Sen, Alessandro Lombardi, Guillermo Cámbara, Andreas Schwarz
Signal Processing
Deep Learning assisted Port-Cycling based Channel Sounding for Precoder Estimation in Massive MIMO Arrays
Advaith Arun, Shiv Shankar, Dhivagar Baskaran et al. (+2 more)
Future wireless systems are expected to employ a substantially larger number of transmit ports for channel state information (CSI) estimation compared to current specifications. Although scaling ports improves spectral efficiency, it also increases the resource overhead to transmit reference signals across the time-frequency grid, ultimately reducing achievable data throughput. In this work, we propose an deep learning (DL)-based CSI reconstruction framework that serves as an enabler for reliable CSI acquisition in future 6G systems. The proposed solution involves designing a port-cycling mechanism that sequentially sounds different portions of CSI ports across time, thereby lowering the overhead while preserving channel observability. The proposed CSI Adaptive Network (CsiAdaNet) model exploits the resulting sparse measurements and captures both spatial and temporal correlations to accurately reconstruct the full-port CSI. The simulation results show that our method achieves overhead reduction while maintaining high CSI reconstruction accuracy.
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All authors Advaith Arun, Shiv Shankar, Dhivagar Baskaran, Klutto Milleth, Bhaskar Ramamurthi
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Communication-Efficient Multi-Modal Edge Inference via Uncertainty-Aware Distributed Learning
Hang Zhao, Hongru Li, Dongfang Xu et al. (+2 more)
Semantic communication is emerging as a key enabler for distributed edge intelligence due to its capability to convey task-relevant meaning. However, achieving communication-efficient training and robust inference over wireless links remains challenging. This challenge is further exacerbated for multi-modal edge inference (MMEI) by two factors: 1) prohibitive communication overhead for distributed learning over bandwidth-limited wireless links, due to the multi-modal nature of the system; and 2) limited robustness under varying channels and noisy multi-modal inputs. In this paper, we propose a three-stage communication-aware distributed learning framework to improve training and inference efficiency while maintaining robustness over wireless channels. In Stage~I, devices perform local multi-modal self-supervised learning to obtain shared and modality-specific encoders without device–server exchange, thereby reducing the communication cost. In Stage~II, distributed fine-tuning with centralized evidential fusion calibrates per-modality uncertainty and reliably aggregates features distorted by noise or channel fading. In Stage~III, an uncertainty-guided feedback mechanism selectively requests additional features for uncertain samples, optimizing the communication–accuracy tradeoff in the distributed setting. Experiments on RGB–depth indoor scene classification show that the proposed framework attains higher accuracy with far fewer training communication rounds and remains robust to modality degradation or channel variation, outperforming existing self-supervised and fully supervised baselines.
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All authors Hang Zhao, Hongru Li, Dongfang Xu, Shenghui Song, Khaled B. Letaief
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.NA
Rank-one Riemannian Subspace Descent for Nonlinear Matrix Equations
Yogesh Darmwal and Ketan Rajawat
We propose a rank-one Riemannian subspace descent
algorithm for computing symmetric positive definite (SPD) solutions to nonlinear
matrix equations arising in control theory, dynamic programming, and
stochastic filtering. For solution
matrices of size $n\times n$, standard approaches for dense
matrix equations typically incur $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$ cost per-iteration, while the efficient $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ methods either rely on sparsity or low-rank solutions, or have iteration counts that scale poorly. The proposed method entails updating along the dominant eigen-component of a transformed Riemannian gradient, identified using at most $\mathcal{O}(\log(n))$ power iterations. The update structure also enables exact step-size selection in many cases at minimal additional cost. For objectives defined as compositions of standard
matrix operations, each iteration can be implemented using only
matrix–vector products, yielding $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ arithmetic cost. We prove an $\mathcal{O}(n)$ iteration bound under standard smoothness assumptions, with improved bounds under geodesic strong convexity. Numerical experiments on large-scale CARE, DARE, and other nonlinear
matrix equations show that the proposed
algorithm solves instances (up to $n=10{,}000$ in our tests) for which the compared solvers, including MATLAB's icare, structure-preserving doubling, and subspace-descent baselines fail to return a solution. These results demonstrate that rank-one
manifold updates provide a practical approach for high-dimensional and dense SPD-constrained
matrix equations. MATLAB code implementation is publicly available on GitHub : \href{https://github.com/yogeshd-iitk/nonlinear_
matrix_equation_R1RSD}{\textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/yogeshd-iitk/nonlinear\_
matrix \_equation\_R1RSD}}
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