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Electrical Engineering and Systems Science

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Monday 16 February

Image and Video Processing

Deep Image Prior for Computed Tomography Reconstruction

We present a comprehensive overview of the Deep Image Prior (DIP) framework and its applications to image reconstruction in computed tomography. Unlike conventional deep learning methods that rely on large, supervised datasets, the DIP exploits the implicit bias of convolutional neural networks and operates in a fully unsupervised setting, requiring only a single measurement, even in the presence of noise. We describe the standard DIP formulation, outline key algorithmic design choices, and review several strategies to mitigate overfitting, including early stopping, explicit regularisation, and self-guided methods that adapt the network input. In addition, we examine computational improvements such as warm-start and stochastic optimisation methods to reduce the reconstruction time. The discussed methods are tested on real $\mu$CT measurements, which allows examination of trade-offs among the different modifications and extensions.
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All authors Simon Arridge, Riccardo Barbano, Alexander Denker, Zeljko Kereta

Audio and Speech Processing

Disentangling Pitch and Creak for Speaker Identity Preservation in Speech Synthesis

We introduce a system capable of faithfully modifying the perceptual voice quality of creak while preserving the speaker's perceived identity. While it is well known that high creak probability is typically correlated with low pitch, it is important to note that this is a property observed on a population of speakers but does not necessarily hold across all situations. Disentanglement of pitch from creak is achieved by augmentation of the training dataset of a speech synthesis system with a speaker manipulation block based on conditional continuous normalizing flow. The experiments show greatly improved speaker verification performance over a range of creak manipulation strengths.
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All authors Frederik Rautenberg, Jana Wiechmann, Petra Wagner, Reinhold Haeb-Umbach

Audio and Speech Processing

Data Augmentation for Pathological Speech Enhancement

The performance of state-of-the-art speech enhancement (SE) models considerably degrades for pathological speech due to atypical acoustic characteristics and limited data availability. This paper systematically investigates data augmentation (DA) strategies to improve SE performance for pathological speakers affected by Parkinson`s disease, evaluating both predictive and generative SE models. We examine three DA categories, i.e., transformative, generative, and noise augmentation, assessing their impact with objective SE metrics. Experimental results show that noise augmentation consistently delivers the largest and most robust gains, transformative augmentations provide moderate improvements, while generative augmentation yields limited benefits and can harm performance as the amount of synthetic data increases. Furthermore, we show that the effectiveness of DA varies depending on the SE model, with DA being more beneficial for predictive SE models. While our results demonstrate that DA improves SE performance for pathological speakers, a performance gap between neurotypical and pathological speech persists, highlighting the need for future research on targeted DA strategies for pathological speech.
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Systems and Control

Segment-Based Two-Loop Adaptive Iterative Learning Control for Spacecraft Position and Attitude Tracking

Proximity operations of rigid bodies, such as spacecraft rendezvous and docking, require precise tracking of both position and attitude over finite time intervals. These operations are often repeated under uncertain conditions, with unknown but repeatable parameters and disturbances. Adaptive iterative learning control (ILC) is well suited to such tasks, as it can track desired trajectories while learning unknown, iteration-invariant signals or parameters. However, conventional adaptive ILC faces two challenges: (i) the coupling between rotational and translational dynamics complicates the design of the two coordinated learning loops for position and attitude, and (ii) standard adaptive ILC designs cannot guarantee bounded control inputs. To address these issues, we propose a dual-number-based, segment-based two-loop adaptive ILC framework for simultaneous high-precision position and attitude tracking. The framework employs two learning loops that interact through a dual-number representation of tracking errors, combining position and attitude errors into a single mathematical object for unified control design. A segment-based dynamic projection mechanism ensures that both parameter estimates and control inputs remain bounded without prior knowledge of uncertainties. Mathematical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework significantly enhances tracking performance under unknown but repeatable uncertainties and strong rotational-translational coupling.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Temporally Flexible Transport Scheduling on Networks with Departure-Arrival Constriction and Nodal Capacity Limits

We investigate the optimal transport (OT) problem over networks, wherein supply and demand are conceptualized as temporal marginals governing departure rates of particles from source nodes and arrival rates at sink nodes. This setting extends the classical OT framework, where all mass is conventionally assumed to depart at $t = 0$ and arrive at $t = t_f$. Our generalization accommodates departures and arrivals at specified times, referred as departure–arrival(DA) constraints. In particular, we impose nodal-temporal flux constraints at source and sink nodes, characterizing two distinct scenarios: (i) Independent DA constraints, where departure and arrival rates are prescribed independently, and (ii) Coupled DA constraints, where each particle's transportation time span is explicitly specified. We establish that OT with independent DA constraints admits a multi-marginal optimal transport formulation, while the coupled DA case aligns with the unequal-dimensional OT framework. For line graphs, we analyze the existence and uniqueness of the solution path. For general graphs, we use a constructive path-based reduction and optimize over a prescribed set of paths. From a computational perspective, we consider entropic regularization of the original problem to efficiently provide solutions based on multi-marginal Sinkhorn method, making use of the graphical structure of the cost to further improve scalability. Our numerical simulation further illustrates the linear convergence rate in terms of marginal violation.
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Signal Processing

Synthetic Aperture Communication: Principles and Application to Massive IoT Satellite Uplink

While synthetic aperture radar is widely adopted to provide high-resolution imaging at long distances using small arrays, the concept of coherent synthetic aperture communication (SAC) has not yet been explored. This article introduces the principles of SAC for direct satellite-to-device uplink, showcasing precise direction-of-arrival estimation for user equipment (UE) devices, facilitating spatial signal separation, localization, and easing link budget constraints. Simulations for a low Earth orbit satellite at 600 km orbit and two UE devices performing orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing-based transmission with polar coding at 3.5 GHz demonstrate block error rates below 0.1 with transmission powers as low as -10 dBm, even under strong interference when UE devices are resolved but fall on each other's strongest angular sidelobe. These results validate the ability of the proposed scheme to address mutual interference and stringent power limitations, paving the way for massive Internet of Things connectivity in non-terrestrial networks.
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Audio and Speech Processing

Event-Grounded Question Answering over Long Audio via Structured Retrieval

Answering natural-language questions over multi-hour audio requires reliable event recognition, temporal grounding, and efficient retrieval. We present LA-RAG (Long Audio Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a structured framework that converts audio into timestamped event records, stores them in an event database, and answers questions using intent-aware retrieval and LLM-based generation. LA-RAG supports two deployment settings: offline grounding mode, in which long recordings are pre-indexed for low-latency querying, and inference-time grounding mode, which performs query-conditioned grounding over shorter, open-ended clips. We evaluate LA-RAG on controlled 24-hour Home-IoT and Industrial-IoT benchmarks and on CASTELLA-QA, derived from real-world audio recordings. The results demonstrate effective long-audio question answering with low query-time latency after grounding and indexing. They also reveal a substantial gap between event detection and temporal localization in current large audio-language models, while showing that explicit timestamped grounding consistently improves temporal reasoning. These findings establish structured grounding and retrieval as a practical complement to generative audio-language models for deployment-oriented long-audio understanding.
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All authors Kartik Hegde, Arvind Krishna Sridhar, Naveen Vakada, Yinyi Guo, Erik Visser

Signal Processing

Learning Dirac Spectral Transforms for Topological Signals

The Dirac operator provides a unified framework for processing signals defined over different order topological domains, such as node and edge signals. Its eigenmodes define a spectral representation that inherently captures cross-domain interactions, in contrast to conventional Hodge-Laplacian eigenmodes that operate within a single topological dimension. In this paper, we compare the two alternatives in terms of the distortion/sparsity trade-off and we show how an overcomplete basis built concatenating the two dictionaries can provide better performance with respect to each approach. Then, we propose a parameterized nonredundant transform whose eigenmodes incorporate a mode-specific mass parameter that captures the interplay between node and edge modes. Interestingly, we show that learning the mass parameters from data makes the proposed transform able to achieve the best distortion-sparsity tradeoff with respect to both complete and overcomplete bases.
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All authors Leonardo Di Nino, Tiziana Cattai, Sergio Barbarossa, Ginestra Bianconi, Paolo Di Lorenzo

Audio and Speech Processing

CLAP-Based Automatic Word Naming Recognition in Post-Stroke Aphasia

Conventional automatic word-naming recognition systems struggle to recognize words from post-stroke patients with aphasia because of disfluencies and mispronunciations, limiting reliable automated assessment in this population. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) based approach for automatic word-naming recognition to address this challenge by leveraging text-audio alignment. Our approach treats word-naming recognition as an audio-text matching problem, projecting speech signals and textual prompts into a shared embedding space to identify intended words even in challenging recordings. Evaluated on two speech datasets of French post-stroke patients with aphasia, our approach achieves up to 90% accuracy, outperforming existing classification-based and automatic speech recognition-based baselines.
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Signal Processing

All-pole centroids in the Wasserstein metric with applications to clustering of spectral densities

In this work, we propose a method for computing centroids, or barycenters, in the spectral Wasserstein-2 metric for sets of power spectral densities, where the barycenters are restricted to belong to the set of all-pole spectra with a certain model order. This may be interpreted as finding an autoregressive representative for sets of second-order stationary Gaussian processes. While Wasserstein, or optimal transport, barycenters have been successfully used earlier in problems of spectral estimation and clustering, the resulting barycenters are non-parametric and the complexity of representing and storing them depends on, e.g., the choice of discretization grid. In contrast, the herein proposed method yields compact, low-dimensional, and interpretable spectral centroids that can be used in downstream tasks. Computing the all-pole centroids corresponds to solving a non-convex optimization problem in the model parameters, and we present a gradient descent scheme for addressing this. Although convergence to a globally optimal point cannot be guaranteed, the sub-optimality of the obtained centroids can be quantified. The proposed method is illustrated on a problem of phoneme classification.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

On the Existence of Koopman Linear Embeddings for Controlled Nonlinear Systems

Koopman linear representations have become a popular tool for control design of nonlinear systems, yet it remains unclear when such representations are exact. In this paper, we establish sufficient and necessary conditions under which a controlled nonlinear system admits an exact finite-dimensional Koopman linear representation, which we term Koopman linear embedding. We show that such a system must be transformable into a special control-affine preserved (CAP) structure, which enforces affine dependence of the state on the control input and isolates all nonlinearities into an autonomous subsystem. We further prove that this autonomous subsystem must itself admit a finite-dimensional Koopman linear model with a sufficiently-rich Koopman invariant subspace. Finally, we introduce a symbolic procedure to determine whether a given controlled nonlinear system admits the CAP structure, thereby elucidating whether Koopman approximation errors arise from intrinsic system dynamics or from the choice of lifting functions.
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All authors Xu Shang, Masih Haseli, Jorge Cortés, Yang Zheng

Signal Processing

Cramer–Rao Bounds for Magneto-Inductive Integrated Sensing and Communications

Magnetic induction (MI) enables communication in RF-denied environments (underground, underwater, in-body), where the medium conductivity imprints a deterministic signature on the channel. This letter derives a closed-form Cramér–Rao bound (CRB) for the joint estimation of range and medium conductivity from MI pilot observations in an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework. The Fisher information matrix reveals that the joint estimation penalty converges to 3\,dB in the near-field regime, meaning conductivity sensing adds at most a factor-of-two loss in ranging precision. Monte Carlo maximum-likelihood simulations confirm that the CRB is achievable under practical operating conditions.
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Systems and Control

Noncooperative Virtual Queue Coordination via Uncertainty-Aware Correlated Equilibria

Collaborative virtual queueing has been proposed as a mechanism to mitigate airport surface congestion while preserving airline autonomy over aircraft-level pushback decisions. A central coordinator can regulate aggregate pushback capacity but cannot directly control which specific aircraft are released, limiting its ability to steer system-level performance. We propose a noncooperative coordination mechanism for collaborative virtual queueing based on the correlated equilibrium concept, which enables the coordinator to provide incentive-compatible recommendations on aircraft-level pushback decisions without overriding airline autonomy. To account for uncertainty in airlines' internal cost assessments, we introduce chance constraints into the correlated equilibrium formulation. This formulation provides explicit probabilistic guarantees on incentive compatibility, allowing the coordinator to adjust the confidence level with which airlines are expected to follow the recommended actions. We further propose a scalable algorithm for computing chance-constrained correlated equilibria by exploiting a reduced-rank structure. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method scales to realistic traffic levels up to 210 eligible pushbacks per hour, reduces accumulated delay by up to approximately 8.9% compared to current first-come-first-served schemes, and reveals a trade-off between confidence level, deviation robustness, and achievable cost efficiency.
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Signal Processing

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces-assisted Positioning in Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

This paper investigates the problem of high-precision target localization in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, where the target is sensed via both a direct path and a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted reflection path. We first develop a sequential matched-filter estimator to acquire coarse angular parameters, followed by a range recovery process based on subcarrier phase differences. Subsequently, we formulate the target localization problem as a non-linear least squares optimization, using the coarse estimates to initialize the target's position coordinates. To solve this efficiently, we introduce a fast iterative refinement algorithm tailored for RIS-aided ISAC environments. Recognizing that the signal model involves both linear path gains and non-linear geometric dependencies, we exploit the separable least-squares structure to decouple these parameters. Furthermore, we propose a modified Levenberg algorithm with an approximation strategy, which enables low-cost parameter updates without necessitating repeated evaluations of the full non-linear model. Simulation results show that the proposed refinement method achieves accuracy comparable to conventional approaches, while significantly reducing algorithmic complexity.
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All authors Huyen-Trang Ta, Ngoc-Son Duong, Trung-Hieu Nguyen, Van-Linh Nguyen, Thai-Mai Dinh

Signal Processing

Online Architecture Search for Compressed Sensing based on Hypergradient Descent

AS-ISTA (Architecture Searched-Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm) and AS-FISTA (AS-Fast ISTA) are compressed sensing algorithms introducing structural parameters to ISTA and FISTA to enable architecture search within the iterative process. The structural parameters are determined using deep unfolding, but this approach requires training data and the large overhead of training time. In this paper, we propose HGD-AS-ISTA (Hypergradient Descent-AS-ISTA) and HGD-AS-FISTA that use hypergradient descent, which is an online hyperparameter optimization method, to determine the structural parameters. Experimental results show that the proposed method improves performance of the conventional ISTA/FISTA while avoiding the need for re-training when the environment changes.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from physics.med-ph

Increasing ultrasound field-of-view with reduced element count arrays containing large elements

Several applications of medical ultrasound can benefit from a larger field of view (FOV). This study is aimed at increasing the FOV of linear array probes by increasing the element width. Coupled elements were used to imitate a larger element width. Through Fourier analysis, theoretical pressure amplitudes, and bandwidth estimates, coupled elements are shown to be close approximations of large elements. The effects of coupling on resolution, contrast, and speckle signal-to-noise ratio are investigated through phantom images and in-vivo images of a rabbit tumor reconstructed with plane-wave compounding. Furthermore, a positioning system was used to acquire data from a virtual large aperture with 120 mm FOV and 128 elements, collected in sections with a single probe. The Null Subtraction Imaging (NSI), Sign Coherence Factor (SCF), and Minimum Variance (MV) beamformers are compared for regaining resolution lost by an increased F-number. The NSI beamformer decreased Full-Width at Half-Max (FWHM) estimates of wire targets by 79% with coupling by 2 compared to uncoupled DAS. The MV beamformer was best for maintaining speckle statistics while improving resolution. Our results demonstrate how increased element width can increase FOV with no increase to element count.
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Systems and Control

Prescribed-Performance-Aware Hybrid-Gain-Based Robust Controller

This paper proposes a prescribed performance function aware hybrid gain finite time sliding mode control framework for a class of nonlinear systems subject to matched disturbances. The hybrid gain structure ensures bounded control effort while retaining finite time convergence, and the incorporation of PPFs enables explicit enforcement of transient performance requirements. Theoretical guarantees are first established for first order systems, characterizing finite time convergence, disturbance rejection, and residual bounds. The approach is then extended to second order dynamics, where a sliding manifold is designed using PPF constraints to facilitate controlled shaping of position and velocity transients. Simulation studies illustrate the proposed design under matched peak control conditions. Comparative results for second-order systems demonstrate that, while a well tuned non-PPF hybrid gain controller achieves competitive tracking performance, the PPF-aware formulation strictly enforces prescribed transient constraints and yields consistent reductions of approximately 9 to 12 percent in integral error and control energy metrics without increasing peak actuation effort.
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Sunday 15 February

Signal Processing

FM-RME: Foundation Model Empowered Radio Map Estimation

Traditional radio map estimation (RME) techniques fail to capture multi-dimensional and dynamic characteristics of complex spectrum environments. Recent data-driven methods achieve accurate RME in spatial domain, but ignore physical prior knowledge of radio propagation, limiting data efficiency especially in multi-dimensional scenarios. To overcome such limitations, we propose a new foundation model, characterized by self-supervised pre-training on diverse data for zero-shot generalization, enabling multi-dimensional radio map estimation (FM-RME). Specifically, FM-RME builds an effective synergy of two core components: a geometry-aware feature extraction module that encodes physical propagation symmetries, i.e., translation and rotation invariance, as inductive bias, and an attention-based neural network that learns long-range correlations across the spatial-temporal-spectral domains. A masked self-supervised multi-dimensional pre-training strategy is further developed to learn generalizable spectrum representations across diverse wireless environments. Once pre-trained, FM-RME supports zero-shot inference for multi-dimensional RME, including spatial, temporal, and spectral estimation, without scenario-specific retraining. Simulation results verify that FM-RME exhibits desired learning performance across diverse datasets and zero-shot generalization capabilities beyond existing RME methods.
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All authors Dong Yang, Yue Wang, Songyang Zhang, Yingshu Li, Zhipeng Cai, Zhi Tian

Systems and Control

Data-Driven Network LQG Mean Field Games with Heterogeneous Populations via Integral Reinforcement Learning

This paper establishes a data-driven solution for infinite horizon linear quadratic Gaussian Mean Field Games with network-coupled heterogeneous agent populations where the dynamics of the agents are unknown. The solution technique relies on Integral Reinforcement Learning and Kleinman's iteration for solving algebraic Riccati equations (ARE). The resulting algorithm uses trajectory data to generate network-coupled MFG strategies for agents and does not require parameters of agents' dynamics. Under technical conditions on the persistency of excitation and on the existence of unique stabilizing solution to the corresponding AREs, the learned network-coupled MFG strategies are shown to converge to their true values.
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Signal Processing

Low-Cost Physical-Layer Security Design for IRS-Assisted mMIMO Systems with One-Bit DACs

Integrating massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems with intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) presents a promising paradigm for enhancing physical-layer security (PLS) in wireless communications. However, deploying high-resolution quantizers in large-scale mMIMO arrays, along with numerous IRS elements, leads to substantial hardware complexity. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a cost-effective PLS design for IRS-assisted mMIMO systems by employing one-bit digital-to-analog converters (DACs). The focus is on jointly optimizing one-bit quantized precoding at the transmitter and constant-modulus phase shifts at the IRS to maximize the secrecy rate. This leads to a highly non-convex fractional secrecy rate maximization (SRM) problem. To efficiently solve this problem, two algorithms are proposed: (1) the WMMSE-PDD algorithm, which reformulates the SRM problem into a sequence of non-fractional programs with auxiliary variables using the weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) method and solves them via the penalty dual decomposition (PDD) approach, achieving superior secrecy performance; and (2) the exact penalty product Riemannian gradient descent (EPPRGD) algorithm, which transforms the SRM problem into an unconstrained optimization over a product Riemannian manifold, eliminating auxiliary variables and enabling faster convergence with a slight trade-off in secrecy performance. Both algorithms provide analytical solutions at each iteration and are proven to converge to Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods and highlight their respective advantages.
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All authors Weijie Xiong, Jian Yang, Jingran Lin, Hongli Liu, Zhiling Xiao, Qiang Li

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

Bengali-Loop: Community Benchmarks for Long-Form Bangla ASR and Speaker Diarization

Bengali (Bangla) remains under-resourced in long-form speech technology despite its wide use. We present Bengali-Loop, two community benchmarks to address this gap: (1) a long-form ASR corpus of 191 recordings (158.6 hours, 792k words) from 11 YouTube channels, collected via a reproducible subtitle-extraction pipeline and human-in-the-loop transcript verification; and (2) a speaker diarization corpus of 24 recordings (22 hours, 5,744 annotated segments) with fully manual speaker-turn labels in CSV format. Both benchmarks target realistic multi-speaker, long-duration content (e.g., Bangla drama/natok). We establish baselines (Tugstugi: 34.07% WER; pyannote.audio: 40.08% DER) and provide standardized evaluation protocols (WER/CER, DER), annotation rules, and data formats to support reproducible benchmarking and future model development for Bangla long-form ASR and diarization.
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All authors H.M. Shadman Tabib, Istiak Ahmmed Rifti, Abdullah Muhammed Amimul Ehsan, Somik Dasgupta, Md Zim Mim Siddiqee Sowdha, Abrar Jahin Sarker, Md. Rafiul Islam Nijamy, Tanvir Hossain, Mst. Metaly Khatun, Munzer Mahmood, Rakesh Debnath, Gourab Biswas, Asif Karim, Wahid Al Azad Navid, Masnoon Muztahid, Fuad Ahmed Udoy, Shahad Shahriar Rahman, Md. Tashdiqur Rahman Shifat, Most. Sonia Khatun, Mushfiqur Rahman, Md. Miraj Hasan, Anik Saha, Mohammad Ninad Mahmud Nobo, Soumik Bhattacharjee, Tusher Bhomik, Ahmmad Nur Swapnil, Shahriar Kabir

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Energy-Efficient Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Pinching Antenna Systems

Pinching antennas systems (PASSs) have recently been proposed as a novel flexible-antenna technology. These systems are implemented by attaching low-cost pinching elements to dielectric waveguides. As the direct link is bypassed through waveguides, PASSs can effectively compensate large-scale effects of the wireless channel. This work explores the potential gains of employing PASSs for over-the-air federated learning (OTA-FL). For a PASS-assisted server, we develop a low-complexity algorithmic approach, which jointly tunes the PASS parameters and schedules the mobile devices for minimal energy consumption in OTA-FL. We study the efficiency of the proposed design and compare it against the conventional OTA-FL setting with MIMO server. Numerical experiments demonstrate that using a single-waveguide PASS at the server within a moderately sized area, the required energy for model aggregation is drastically reduced as compared to the case with fully-digital MIMO server. This introduces PASS as a potential technology for energy-efficient distributed learning in next generations of wireless systems.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Path Planning Optimisation for SParse, AwaRe and Cooperative Networked Aerial Robot Teams (SpArC-NARTs): Optimisation Tool and Ground Sensing Coverage Use Cases

A networked aerial robot team (NART) comprises a group of agents (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), ground control stations, etc.) interconnected by wireless links. Inter-agent connectivity, even if intermittent (i.e. sparse), enables data exchanges between agents and supports cooperative behaviours in several NART missions. It can benefit online decentralised decision-making and group resilience, particularly when prior knowledge is inaccurate or incomplete. These requirements can be accounted for in the offline mission planning stages to incentivise cooperative behaviours and improve mission efficiency during the NART deployment. This paper proposes a novel path planning tool for a Sparse, Aware, and Cooperative Networked Aerial Robot Team (SpArC-NART) in exploration missions. It simultaneously considers different levels of prior information regarding the environment, limited agent energy, sensing, and communication, as well as distinct NART constitutions. The communication model takes into account the limitations of user-defined radio technology and physical phenomena. The proposed tool aims to maximise the mission goals (e.g., finding one or multiple targets, covering the full area of the environment, etc.), while cooperating with other agents to reduce agent reporting times, increase their global situational awareness (e.g., their knowledge of the environment), and facilitate mission replanning, if required. The developed cooperation mechanism leverages soft-motion constraints and dynamic rewards based on the Value of Movement and the expected communication availability between the agents at each time step. A ground sensing coverage use case was chosen to illustrate the current capabilities of this tool.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Muscle Coactivation in the Sky: Geometry and Pareto Optimality of Energy vs. Aerodynamic Promptness and Multirotors as Variable Stiffness Actuators

In robotics and biomechanics, trading metabolic cost for kinematic readiness is a well-established principle. This paper formalizes this concept for aerial multirotors through the introduction of aerodynamic promptness – a dynamic metric analogous to dynamic manipulability in robotics. By formulating redundancy resolution as a geometric multi-objective optimization along task fibers, we rigorously characterize the topological trade-off between energy consumption and promptness. We demonstrate that this interplay is fundamentally governed by fiber geometry. Cooperative actuation regime yields compact fibers with bounded, compatible Pareto fronts. Conversely, antagonistic actuation regime unlocks unbounded fibers, enabling aerodynamic co-contraction that drives promptness to hardware limits at the expense of flight endurance. We establish a structural isomorphism between aerodynamic co-contraction and biologically inspired variable stiffness actuators, introducing a dynamic “flying muscle” paradigm. Ultimately, this framework transitions multirotor allocation from heuristic energy minimization to principled, geometry-aware Pareto navigation, laying foundational theory for the design and control of highly agile aerial platforms.
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Image and Video Processing

Learnable Multi-level Discrete Wavelet Transforms for 3D Gaussian Splatting Frequency Modulation

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a powerful approach for novel view synthesis. However, the number of Gaussian primitives often grows substantially during training as finer scene details are reconstructed, leading to increased memory and storage costs. Recent coarse-to-fine strategies regulate Gaussian growth by modulating the frequency content of the ground-truth images. In particular, AutoOpti3DGS employs the learnable Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to enable data-adaptive frequency modulation. Nevertheless, its modulation depth is limited by the 1-level DWT, and jointly optimizing wavelet regularization with 3D reconstruction introduces gradient competition that promotes excessive Gaussian densification. In this paper, we propose a multi-level DWT-based frequency modulation framework for 3DGS. By recursively decomposing the low-frequency subband, we construct a deeper curriculum that provides progressively coarser supervision during early training, consistently reducing Gaussian counts. Furthermore, we show that the modulation can be performed using only a single scaling parameter, rather than learning the full 2-tap high-pass filter. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our method further reduces Gaussian counts while maintaining competitive rendering quality.
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Signal Processing

Robust SAC-Enabled UAV-RIS Assisted Secure MISO Systems With Untrusted EH Receivers

Secure downlink transmission in UAV-assisted reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enabled multiuser MISO systems is challenging due to imperfect channel state information (CSI), untrusted energy-harvesting receivers (UEHRs), and the strong coupling among UAV deployment, transmit power control, and RIS configuration. In this paper, we study a secure UAV-assisted RIS-enabled multiuser MISO system with UEHRs, where a hovering UAV-mounted RIS is jointly optimized in terms of its location, transmit power allocation, and discrete RIS phase shifts. The objective is to maximize the worst-case secrecy energy efficiency (WCSEE) under imperfect CSI and practical discrete phase-shift constraints. The resulting problem is highly nonconvex due to the fractional objective, coupled design variables, discrete phase shifts, and CSI uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose two complementary approaches. First, a block coordinate descent (BCD) framework combined with successive convex approximation (SCA) is developed to solve a secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) formulation, serving as a structured model-based benchmark. Second, for the more general WCSEE problem, we propose a tailored soft actor-critic (SAC) framework that captures the coupling among variables and avoids repeated iterative optimization. Simulation results show that the proposed SAC method consistently outperforms conventional optimization and deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based benchmarks, including deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3), while maintaining robustness to CSI uncertainty and stable performance across system configurations.
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All authors Hamid Reza Hashempour, Le-Nam Tran, Duy H. N. Nguyen, Hien Quoc Ngo

Signal Processing

Magnetic-Field-Based Localization Using Spatial Field Variations: Signal Processing Principles, Models, and Challenges

Signal processing has played, and continues to play, a fundamental role in the evolution of modern localization technologies. Localization using spatial variations in the Earth's magnetic field is no exception. It relies on signal-processing methods for statistical state inference, magnetic-field modeling, and sensor calibration. Contemporary localization techniques based on spatial variations in the magnetic field can provide decimeter-level indoor localization accuracy and outdoor localization accuracy on par with strategic-grade inertial navigation systems. This article provides a broad, high-level overview of current signal-processing principles and open research challenges in localization using spatial variations in the Earth's magnetic field. The aim is to provide the reader with an understanding of the similarities and differences among existing key technologies from a statistical signal-processing perspective. To that end, existing key technologies will be presented within a common parametric signal-model framework compatible with well-established statistical inference methods.
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All authors Isaac Skog, Manon Kok, Christophe Prieur, Gustaf Hendeby

Signal Processing

Explainable Interictal Epileptiform Discharge Detection Method Based on Scalp EEG and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The detection of interictal epileptiform discharge (IED) is crucial for the diagnosis of epilepsy, but automated methods often lack interpretability. This study proposes IED-RAG, an explainable multimodal framework for joint IED detection and report generation. Our approach employs a dual-encoder to extract electrophysiological and semantic features, aligned via contrastive learning in a shared EEG-text embedding space. During inference, clinically relevant EEG-text pairs are retrieved from a vector database as explicit evidence to condition a large language model (LLM) for the generation of evidence-based reports. Evaluated on a private dataset from Wuhan Children's Hospital and the public TUH EEG Events Corpus (TUEV), the framework achieved balanced accuracies of 89.17% and 71.38%, with BLEU scores of 89.61% and 64.14%, respectively. The results demonstrate that retrieval of explicit evidence enhances both diagnostic performance and clinical interpretability compared to standard black-box methods.
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All authors Yu Zhu, Jiayang Guo, Jun Jiang, Peipei Gu, Xin Shu, Duo Chen

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from quant-ph

Bidirectional Quantum Processor Interfacing by a 4-Kelvin Analog Signal Chain for Superconducting Qubit Control and Quantum State Readout

This paper presents a comprehensive cryogenic analog signal processing architecture designed for superconducting qubit control and quantum state readout operating at 4 Kelvin. The proposed system implements a complete bidirectional signal path bridging room-temperature digital controllers with quantum processors at millikelvin stages. The control path incorporates a Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) for stable local oscillator generation, In-phase/Quadrature (I/Q) modulation for precise qubit gate operations, and a cryogenic power amplifier for signal conditioning. The readout path features a Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) with 14 dB gain and 8-Phase Shift Keying (8-PSK) demodulation for quantum state discrimination. All circuit blocks are designed and validated through SPICE simulations employing cryogenic MOSFET models at 180nm that account for carrier freeze-out, threshold voltage elevation, and enhanced mobility at 4 K. Simulation results demonstrate successful end-to-end signal integrity with I/Q phase error below 2{\deg}, image rejection ratio exceeding 35~dB, and symbol error rate below $10^{-6}$. This work provides a modular, simulation-validated framework for scalable cryogenic quantum control systems.
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All authors Deepak R V, Lokendra Kanawat, Jayadeep K, Priyesh Shukla

Signal Processing

Electromagnetic Bounds on Realizing Targeted MIMO Transfer Functions in Real-World Systems with Wave-Domain Programmability

A key question for most applications involving reconfigurable linear wave systems is how accurately a desired linear operator can be realized by configuring the system's tunable elements. The relevance of this question spans from hybrid-MIMO analog combiners via computational meta-imagers to programmable wave-domain signal processing. Yet, no electromagnetically consistent bounds have been derived for the fidelity with which a desired operator can be realized in a real-world reconfigurable wave system. Here, we derive such bounds based on an electromagnetically consistent multiport-network model (capturing mutual coupling between tunable elements) and accounting for real-world hardware constraints (lossy, 1-bit-programmable elements). Specifically, we formulate the operator-synthesis task as a quadratically constrained fractional-quadratic problem and compute rigorous fidelity upper bounds based on semidefinite relaxation. We apply our technique to three distinct experimental setups. The first two setups are, respectively, a free-space and a rich-scattering $4\times 4$ MIMO channel at 2.45 GHz parameterized by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) comprising 100 1-bit-programmable elements. The third setup is a $4\times 4$ MIMO channel at 19 GHz from four feeds of a dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA) to four users. We systematically study how the achievable fidelity scales with the number of tunable elements, and we probe the tightness of our bounds by trying to find optimized configurations approaching the bounds with standard discrete-optimization techniques. We observe a strong influence of the coupling strength between tunable elements on our fidelity bound. For the two RIS-based setups, our bound attests to insufficient wave-domain flexibility for the considered operator synthesis.
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