Papers

Active infrared thermography (AIRT) is currently witnessing a surge of artificial intelligence (AI) methodologies being deployed for automated subsurface defect analysis of high performance carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRP). Deploying AI-based AIRT methodologies for inspecting CFRPs requires the creation of time consuming and expensive datasets of CFRP inspection sequences to train neural networks. To address this challenge, this work introduces a novel language-guided framework for cognitive defect analysis in CFRPs using AIRT and vision-language models (VLMs). Unlike conventional learning-based approaches, the proposed framework does not require developing training datasets for extensive training of defect detectors, instead it relies solely on pretrained multimodal VLM encoders coupled with a lightweight adapter to enable generative zero-shot understanding and localization of subsurface defects. By leveraging pretrained multimodal encoders, the proposed system enables generative zero-shot understanding of thermographic patterns and automatic detection of subsurface defects. Given the domain gap between thermographic data and natural images used to train VLMs, an AIRT-VLM Adapter is proposed to enhance the visibility of defects while aligning the thermographic domain with the learned representations of VLMs. The proposed framework is validated using three representative VLMs; specifically, GroundingDINO, Qwen-VL-Chat, and CogVLM. Validation is performed on 25 CFRP inspection sequences with impacts introduced at different energy levels, reflecting realistic defects encountered in industrial scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that the AIRT-VLM adapter achieves signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains exceeding 10 dB compared with conventional thermographic dimensionality-reduction methods, while enabling zero-shot defect detection with intersection-over-union values reaching 70%.

Degradation prognosis for lithium-ion cells requires forecasting the state-of-health (SOH) trajectory over future cycles. Existing data-driven approaches can produce trajectory outputs through direct regression, but lack a mechanism to propagate degradation dynamics forward in time. This paper formulates battery degradation prognosis as a world model problem, encoding raw voltage, current, and temperature time-series from each cycle into a latent state and propagating it forward via a learned dynamics transition to produce a future trajectory spanning 80 cycles. To investigate whether electrochemical knowledge improves the learned dynamics, a Single Particle Model (SPM) constraint is incorporated into the training loss. Three configurations are evaluated on the Severson LiFePO4 (LFP) dataset of 138 cells. Iterative rollout halves the trajectory forecast error compared to direct regression from the same encoder. The SPM constraint improves prediction at the degradation knee where the resistance to SOH relationship is most applicable, without changing aggregate accuracy.

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are poised to revolutionize next-generation wireless communication systems by enhancing channel quality and spectrum efficiency through advanced wave manipulation. However, extremely large-scale IRS {(XL-IRS)} deployments face significant challenges in channel estimation due to multiplicative path loss and near-field (NF) effects, where spherical wavefronts couple distance and angle parameters. Existing polar-domain codebook-based compressive sensing methods for NF channel estimation suffer from low accuracy and high complexity, caused by the need for high-resolution grids of both distance and angle parameters. To address this, we propose a harmonic processing-inspired channel estimation framework for NF {XL-IRS} systems by leveraging tensor modalization to decouple channel parameters. Drawing an analogy to musical harmonic analysis, our approach decomposes the high-dimensional NF channel tensor into independent factor matrices, modeled as “chords," representing distance and angle parameters. Through harmonic analysis-inspired distance parameter decoupling, we design a compact, distance-dependent codebook that enables high-resolution NF channel parameter estimation. This approach significantly reduces the codebook size compared to polar-domain methods. {Then, we} derive the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) to evaluate the estimators. Finally, simulation results show an 8.5 dB improvement in normalized mean square error (NMSE) compared to conventional methods, underscoring its low complexity and high accuracy.

We study timestamped speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) for long-form, multi-party speech with overlap. In this setting, chunk-wise inference must preserve meeting-level speaker identity consistency while producing time-stamped, speaker-labeled transcripts. Prior Speech-LLM systems tend to prioritize either local diarization or global labeling, lacking the ability to jointly model fine-grained temporal boundaries and robust cross-chunk identity linking. We propose G-STAR, an end-to-end framework that couples a cache-conditioned speaker-tracking module with a Speech-LLM transcription backbone. The tracker provides structured speaker cues with temporal grounding, and the LLM generates attributed text conditioned on these cues. G-STAR supports component-wise optimization and joint end-to-end training, enabling flexible learning under heterogeneous supervision and domain shift. Under chunk-wise decoding protocols, experiments on both oracle-segmented local evaluation and full-meeting global evaluation show strong speaker-attributed transcription performance.

Radio Dynamic Zones (RDZs) are geographically defined areas specifically allocated for testing new wireless technologies. It is essential to safeguard the regular spectrum users outside the zones from the interference caused by the deployed equipment within this zone. Previous works have utilized sparse reference signal received power (RSRP) measurements collected by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to construct a dense 3D radio map through ordinary Kriging. In this work, we illustrate that matrix completion can outperform ordinary Kriging. We partitioned a 2D area of interest into small square grids where each grid corresponds to a single entry of a matrix. The matrix completion algorithm learns the global structure of the radio environment map by leveraging the low-rank property of propagation maps. Additionally, we illustrate that the simple Kriging and trans-Gaussian Kriging yield better results when the density of known measurements is lower. Earlier works of RSRP prediction involved a training dataset at a single altitude. In this work, we also show that performance can be improved by utilizing a combined dataset from multiple altitudes.

This paper presents a novel wireless sensing system where a movable antenna (MA) continuously moves and receives sensing signals within a three-dimensional (3-D) region to enhance sensing performance compared with conventional fixed-position antenna (FPA)-based sensing. We show that the performance of direction vector estimation for a target is fundamentally related to the 3-D MA trajectory in terms of the mean square angular error lower-bound (MSAEB), which is adopted as a coordinate-invariant performance metric. In particular, the closed-form expression of the MSAEB is derived as a function of the trajectory covariance matrix. Theoretical analysis shows that two-dimensional (2-D) antenna movement suffers from performance divergence for target direction close to the endfire direction of the 2-D MA plane, whereas 3-D movement can achieve isotropic sensing performance over the entire angular region. To achieve robust sensing performance, we formulate a min-max optimization problem to minimize the maximum (worst-case) MSAEB over a given continuous angular region wherein the target is located. An efficient successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm is developed to optimize the 3-D MA trajectory and obtain a locally optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed 3-D MA sensing scheme is able to significantly reduce the worst-case mean square angular error (MSAE) compared with conventional arrays with FPAs and MA systems with 2-D movement only, thus achieving more accurate and robust direction estimation over the entire angular region.

In this paper, we introduce Spyglass, a spectrum sensor designed to address the challenges of effective spectrum usage in dense wireless environments. Spyglass is capable of observing a frequency band and accurately estimating the Angle of Arrival (AoA) of any signal during a single transmission. This includes additional signal context such as center frequency, bandwidth, and I/Q samples. We overcome challenges such as the clutter of fleeting transmissions in common bands, the high cost of array processing for AoA estimation, and the difficulty of detecting and estimating channels for unknown signals. Our first contribution is the development of Searchlite, a protocol-agnostic signal detection and separation algorithm. We use a switched array to reduce cost and processing complexity, and we develop SSFP, a signal processing technique using Fourier transforms that is synchronized to switching boundaries. Spyglass performs multi-channel blind AoA estimation synchronized with the array. Implemented using commercially available hardware, Spyglass demonstrates a median AoA accuracy of 1.4$^\circ$ and the ability to separate simultaneous signals from multiple devices in an unconstrained RF environment, providing valuable tools for large-scale RF data collection and analysis.

We present FireRedASR2S, a state-of-the-art industrial-grade all-in-one automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. It integrates four modules in a unified pipeline: ASR, Voice Activity Detection (VAD), Spoken Language Identification (LID), and Punctuation Prediction (Punc). All modules achieve SOTA performance on the evaluated benchmarks: FireRedASR2: An ASR module with two variants, FireRedASR2-LLM (8B+ parameters) and FireRedASR2-AED (1B+ parameters), supporting speech and singing transcription for Mandarin, Chinese dialects and accents, English, and code-switching. Compared to FireRedASR, FireRedASR2 delivers improved recognition accuracy and broader dialect and accent coverage. FireRedASR2-LLM achieves 2.89% average CER on 4 public Mandarin benchmarks and 11.55% on 19 public Chinese dialects and accents benchmarks, outperforming competitive baselines including Doubao-ASR, Qwen3-ASR, and Fun-ASR. FireRedVAD: An ultra-lightweight module (0.6M parameters) based on the Deep Feedforward Sequential Memory Network (DFSMN), supporting streaming VAD, non-streaming VAD, and multi-label VAD (mVAD). On the FLEURS-VAD-102 benchmark, it achieves 97.57% frame-level F1 and 99.60% AUC-ROC, outperforming Silero-VAD, TEN-VAD, FunASR-VAD, and WebRTC-VAD. FireRedLID: An Encoder-Decoder LID module supporting 100+ languages and 20+ Chinese dialects and accents. On FLEURS (82 languages), it achieves 97.18% utterance-level accuracy, outperforming Whisper and SpeechBrain. FireRedPunc: A BERT-style punctuation prediction module for Chinese and English. On multi-domain benchmarks, it achieves 78.90% average F1, outperforming FunASR-Punc (62.77%). To advance research in speech processing, we release model weights and code at https://github.com/FireRedTeam/FireRedASR2S.

Movable antennas (MAs) have emerged as a promising technology for wireless sensing by reconfiguring antenna positions to exploit additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs). This paper investigates a robust movable antenna placement strategy for near-field wireless sensing to minimize the worst-case squared position error bound (SPEB). By temporarily relaxing the minimum inter-element spacing constraint, we first establish the optimality of centro-symmetric antenna position distribution, which simplifies the identification of the worst-case source, locating it at the array broadside on the Rayleigh boundary. Moreover, by leveraging moment-based analysis with the Richter-Tchakaloff theorem, we derive a closed-form optimal solution with three points supported on the center and two edges of the array. Guided by this structural insight, we finally develop an efficient three-point discrete deployment strategy to ensure the minimum inter-element spacing. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed design consistently outperforms conventional fixed antenna arrays and matches the exhaustive search benchmark at negligible computational complexity.

Speech tokenizers are essential for connecting speech to large language models (LLMs) in multimodal systems. Speech tokenizers are expected to preserve both semantic and acoustic information for downstream understanding and generation tasks. However, emerging evidence suggests that the term "semantic" in speech processing does not align with linguistic lexical-semantic, leading to a mismatch between speech and text modality. In this paper, we systematically analyze the information encoded by several widely used speech tokenizers, evaluating their lexical-semantic and phonetic content through three tasks. Our results show that current tokenizers primarily capture phonetic rather than lexical-semantic structure, deriving practical implications for the design of next-generation speech tokenization methods. Code is released to public at https://github.com/Alexuan/codec_probing_release.

Spectrum sensing and the generation of 3D Radio Environment Maps (REMs) are essential for enabling spectrum sharing within cognitive radio networks. While Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer high-mobility 3D sensing, REM accuracy is challenged by dynamic flight behaviors, where fluctuations in UAV speed and direction introduce measurement inconsistencies. Furthermore, the airframe itself impacts the onboard antenna's radiation characteristics. In this paper, using real-world data, we systematically analyze how REM reconstruction accuracy is shaped by three key pillars: physical sensing parameters like altitude and bandwidth, environmental shadowing, and distortions caused by the UAV airframe. First, we benchmark diverse spatial prediction models, including simple Kriging (SK), ordinary Kriging (OK), trans-Gaussian Kriging, and Gaussian process regression (GPR). We demonstrate that while SK and its trans-Gaussian variant are highly accurate at extreme sample sparsity, OK improves as sample size increases, and GPR serves as the most stable overall baseline. Building on this, we propose a novel matrix completion (MC)-assisted GPR framework that enhances REM reconstruction in the presence of non-uniform spatial smoothness. The method operates by decomposing the REM into two distinct layers: a global smooth component and a highly varying local component. Our analysis based on real-world measurements reveals three key findings: 1) REM accuracy and shadowing variance follow a distinct tri-phasic trend as the UAV altitude increases; 2) REM accuracy significantly improves with increased spectrum bandwidth; and 3) antenna pattern calibration from in-field measurements significantly enhances REM accuracy by accounting for the effect of the UAV airframe.

To meet the evolving demands of sixth-generation (6G) wireless channel modeling, such as precise prediction capability, extension capabilities, and system participation capability, multi-modal intelligent channel modeling (MMICM) has been proposed based on Synesthesia of Machines (SoM) which explores the mapping relationship between multi-modal sensing in physical environment and channel characteristics in electromagnetic space. Furthermore, for integrating heterogeneous sensing, reasoning across scales, and generalizing to complex air-space-ground-sea communication environments, two new paradigms of MMICM are explored, including fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) for Channel Modeling (LLM4CM) and Wireless Channel Foundation Model (WiCo). LLM4CM leverages pre-trained LLMs on channel representations for cross-modal alignment and lightweight adaptation, enabling flexible channel modeling for 6G multi-band and multi-scenario communication systems. WiCo, which pre-trained on physically valid channel realizations and their associated environmental and modal observations, embeds electromagnetic equations for physical interpretability and uses parameterized adapters for scalability. This article details the architectures and features of LLM4CM and WiCo, laying a foundation for artificial intelligence (AI)-native 6G wireless communication systems. Then, we conducts a comparative analysis of the two emerging paradigms, focusing on their distinct characteristics, relative advantages, inherent limitations, and performance attributes. Finally, we discuss the future research directions.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but frequently suffer from a "Precision-Reasoning Gap" in cluttered environments. This failure is driven by background-induced feature dilution, where high-frequency semantic noise corrupts the geometric grounding required for precise manipulation. To bridge this gap, we propose Concept-Gated Visual Distillation (CGVD), a training-free, model-agnostic inference framework that stabilizes VLA policies. CGVD operates by parsing instructions into safe and distractor sets, utilizing a two-layer target refinement process–combining cross-validation and spatial disambiguation–to explicitly penalize false positives and isolate genuine manipulation targets. We then process the scene via Fourier-based inpainting, generating a clean observation that actively suppresses semantic distractors while preserving critical spatial geometry and visual proprioception. Extensive evaluations in highly cluttered manipulation tasks demonstrate that CGVD prevents performance collapse. In environments with dense semantic distractors, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 77.5% success rate compared to the baseline's 43.0%. By enforcing strict attribute adherence, CGVD establishes inference-time visual distillation as a critical prerequisite for robust robotic manipulation in the clutter.

Adaptive ansatz construction has emerged as a powerful technique for reducing circuit depth and improving optimization efficiency in variational quantum eigensolvers. However, existing adaptive methods, including ADAPT-VQE, rely solely on first-order gradients and therefore ignore the underlying geometry of the quantum state space, limiting both convergence behavior and operator-selection efficiency. We introduce Geo-ADAPT-VQE, a geometry-aware adaptive VQE algorithm that selects operators from a pool using the natural gradient rule. The geometric operator-selection rule enables the ansatz to grow along directions aligned with the underlying quantum-state geometry, thereby improving convergence and reducing the algorithm's susceptibility to shallow local minima and saddle-point regions. We further provide an asymptotic convergence result. We present numerical simulations involving five molecules, which demonstrate that Geo-ADAPT-VQE achieves faster and more stable convergence compared to existing methods, while producing significantly shorter ansatz. In particular, Geo-ADAPT achieves up to 100-fold reduction in energy error compared to existing methods.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning through techniques like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, their reasoning largely re-mains textual and hypothetical, lacking empirical grounding in complex, dynamic domains like transportation. This paper introduces Simulation-in-the-Reasoning (SiR), a novel conceptual framework that embeds domain-specific simulators directly into the LLM reasoning loop. By treating intermediate reasoning steps as executable simulation experiments, SiR transforms LLM reasoning from narrative plausibility into a falsifiable, hypothesis-simulate-analyze workflow. We discuss applications, where LLM can formulate Intelligent Transport System (ITS) strategy hypotheses, invoke a traffic simulator via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), evaluate results under different demand patterns, and refine strategies through verification and aggregation. While implementing the framework is part of our ongoing work, this paper primarily establishes the conceptual foundation, discusses design considerations like API granularity, and outlines the vision of SiR as a cornerstone for interactive transportation digital twins. We argue that SiR represents a critical step towards trustworthy, empirically-validated AI for autonomous transportation systems.

In this paper, we present a data-driven output feedback controller for nonlinear systems that achieves practical output regulation, using noise-free input/output measurement data. The proposed controller is based on (i) an inverse model of the system identified via kernel interpolation, which maps a desired output and the current state to the corresponding desired control input; and (ii) a data-driven reference selection framework that actively chooses a suitable desired output from the dataset which has been used for the identification. We establish a verifiable sufficient condition on the dataset under which the proposed controller guarantees practical output regulation. Numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller, with additional evaluations in the presence of output measurement noise to assess its robustness empirically.

Experimental Modal Analysis (EMA) has been widely used to identify structural dynamic properties, including natural frequencies, damping ratios, and mode shapes, for structural integrity assessment. The Poly-reference Least Squares Complex Frequency (pLSCF) method is one of the most widely adopted approaches for EMA because of its strong ability to separate closely spaced modes and its robustness to measurement noise. However, pLSCF-based EMA is generally limited to low-dimensional cases with a small number of measurement points, as its computational cost increases rapidly for high-dimensional or continuous structural measurements, particularly with increasing model order. To overcome this limitation, this paper develops a high-dimensional EMA framework based on Dynamic Mode Decomposition with control (DMDc), a powerful data-driven technique originally developed in fluid dynamics, for modal identification under high-dimensional measurement scenarios. Specifically, the relationship between pLSCF and time-delay DMDc is clarified through the discrete state-space representation of the auto-regressive with exogenous inputs (ARX) model for linear systems. By showing that both methods describe the same physical dynamics of the structure, this study provides a physics-based rationale for applying time-delay DMDc to EMA. The capability and advantages of time-delay DMDc for modal parameter identification in both low- and high-dimensional measurements are validated through numerical simulations of a 6-DOF system and experiments on a cantilever beam using a digital camera. The results demonstrate that time-delay DMDc enables robust and reliable modal parameter identification, effectively addressing high-dimensional EMA problems that are difficult for conventional pLSCF and highlighting its potential for real-world structural dynamics applications.

Many speech enhancement (SE) methods rely on continuous representations. Recently, discrete audio tokens have been explored to enable autoregressive generation for SE. However, it remains unclear whether discretization itself consistently improves SE performance. In this paper, we introduce LL-SDR, a token-based speech enhancement framework that explicitly leverages discretization to better separate speech and noise. Our first contribution is a Variance-Ordered Residual Vector Quantizer (VO-RVQ), designed to disentangle speech and noise distributions during tokenization. Second, we propose a latent-space discriminator to better align enhanced embeddings with semantic embeddings. Experiments show that LL-SDR outperforms continuous baselines and matches the performance of autoregressive token-based approaches. Despite its strong enhancement performance, LL-SDR remains lightweight and efficient, requiring only 40G MACs for a single forward pass on a 10-second 16 kHz speech segment and achieving low-latency inference with an RTF of 0.01 on GPU and 0.24 on CPU. Demos and source code are available at our project websites.

Neural audio codecs discretize speech via residual vector quantization (RVQ), forming a coarse-to-fine hierarchy across quantizers. While codec models have been explored for representation learning, their discrete structure remains underutilized in speech deepfake detection. In particular, different quantization levels capture complementary acoustic cues, where early quantizers encode coarse structure and later quantizers refine residual details that reveal synthesis artifacts. Existing systems either rely on continuous encoder features or ignore this quantizer-level hierarchy. We propose a hierarchy-aware representation learning framework that models quantizer-level contributions through learnable global weighting, enabling structured codec representations aligned with forensic cues. Keeping the speech encoder backbone frozen and updating only 4.4% additional parameters, our method achieves relative EER reductions of 46.2% on ASVspoof 2019 and 13.9% on ASVspoof5 over strong baselines.

In human-robot collaboration (HRC), robots must adapt online to dynamic task constraints and evolving human intent. While physical corrections provide a natural, low-latency channel for operators to convey motion-level adjustments, extracting task-level semantic intent from such brief interactions remains challenging. Existing foundation-model-based approaches primarily rely on vision and language inputs and lack mechanisms to interpret physical feedback. Meanwhile, traditional physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) methods leverage physical corrections for trajectory guidance but struggle to infer task-level semantics. To bridge this gap, we propose TATIC, a unified framework that utilizes torque-based contact force estimation and a task-aware Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) to jointly infer discrete task-level intent and estimate continuous motion-level parameters from brief physical corrections. Task-aligned feature canonicalization ensures robust generalization across diverse layouts, while an intent-driven adaptation scheme translates inferred human intent into robot motion adaptations. Experiments achieve a 0.904 Macro-F1 score in intent recognition and demonstrate successful hardware validation in collaborative disassembly (see experimental video at https://youtu.be/xF8A52qwEc8).

This paper introduces a new algorithm for trajectory optimization, Decoupled Reduced-space and Adaptive Feasibility-repair Trajectory Optimization (DRAFTO). It first constructs a constrained objective that accounts for smoothness, safety, joint limits, and task requirements. Then, it optimizes the coefficients, which are the coordinates of a set of basis functions for trajectory parameterization. To reduce the number of repeated constrained optimizations while handling joint-limit feasibility, the optimization is decoupled into a reduced-space Gauss-Newton (GN) descent for the main iterations and constrained quadratic programming for initialization and terminal feasibility repair. The two-phase acceptance rule with a non-monotone policy is applied to the GN model, which uses a hinge-squared penalty for inequality constraints, to ensure globalizability. The results of our benchmark tests against optimization-based planners, such as CHOMP, TrajOpt, GPMP2, and FACTO, and sampling-based planners, such as RRT-Connect, RRT*, and PRM, validate the high efficiency and reliability across diverse scenarios and tasks. The experiment involving grabbing an object from a drawer further demonstrates the potential for implementation in complex manipulation tasks. The supplemental video is available at https://youtu.be/XisFI37YyTQ.

Conventional stochastic control methods have several limitations. They focus on optimizing the average performance and, in some cases, performance variability; however, their problem settings still require an explicit specification of the probability distributions that determine the system's stochastic behavior. Distributionally robust control (DRC) methods have recently been developed to address these challenges. However, many DRC approaches involve handling infinitely many inequalities. For instance, DRC problems based on the Wasserstein distance are commonly obtained by solving semi-infinite programming (SIP) problems. Our proposed method eliminates the need for SIP when solving discrete-time, discounted, distributionally robust optimal control problems. By introducing a penalty term based on a specific distributional distance, we establish upper bounds, and under appropriate conditions, demonstrate the equivalence between distributionally robust optimization problems and mean-variance minimization problems. This reformulation reduces the original DRC problem to a discounted mean-variance cost optimization problem. In linear-quadratic regulator settings, the corresponding control laws are obtained by solving the Riccati equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the theoretical maximum value of the discounted cumulative cost for the proposed method is lower than that for the conventional method.

This paper addresses the problem of designing recommendation systems for social networks and e-commerce platforms from a control-theoretic perspective. We treat the design of recommendation systems as a state-feedback infinite-horizon optimal control problem with a performance index that (i) rewards alignment and engagement, (ii) penalizes polarization and large deviations from an uncontrolled baseline, and (iii) regularizes exposure across neighboring users. The recommendation entries are fed to the platform users, who are assumed to follow a networked, multi-topic, continuous-time opinion dynamics. We show that the designed control yields a stabilizing recommendation system under simple algebraic spectral conditions on the weights that encode the platform's preference for engagement, stability of preferences, polarization, and cross-user diversity. Conversely, we show that when ill-posed weights are selected in the optimal control problem (namely, when engagement is excessively rewarded), the closed-loop system can exhibit destabilizing, pathological behaviors that conflict with the design objectives.

Public power-system datasets often lack electromagnetic transient (EMT) waveforms, inverter control dynamics, and diverse disturbance coverage, which limits their usefulness for training surrogate models and studying cyber-physical behavior in inverter-based microgrids. This paper presents a high-fidelity digital twin dataset generated from a MATLAB/Simulink EMT model of a low-voltage AC microgrid with ten inverter-based distributed generators. The dataset records synchronized three-phase PCC voltages and currents, per-DG active power, reactive power, and frequency, together with embedded scenario labels, producing 38 aligned channels sampled at $\Delta t = 2~\mu$s over $T = 1$~s ($N = 500{,}001$ samples) per scenario. Eleven operating and disturbance scenarios are included: normal operation, load step, voltage sag (temporary three-phase fault), load ramp, frequency ramp, DG trip, tie-line trip, reactive power step, single-line-to-ground faults, measurement noise injection, and communication delay. To ensure numerical stability without altering sequence length, invalid samples (NaN, Inf, and extreme outliers) are repaired using linear interpolation. Each scenario is further validated using system-level evidence from mean frequency, PCC voltage magnitude, total active power, voltage unbalance, and zero-sequence current to confirm physical observability and correct timing. The resulting dataset provides a consistent, labeled EMT benchmark for surrogate modeling, disturbance classification, robustness testing under noise and delay, and cyber-physical resilience analysis in inverter-dominated microgrids. The dataset and processing scripts will be released upon acceptance

This paper investigates the formation control problem of heterogeneous, autonomous agents that communicate over a wireless multiple access channel. Instead of avoiding interference through orthogonal node-to-node transmissions, we exploit the superposition property of the wireless channel to compute, at each receiver, normalized convex combinations of simultaneously broadcast neighbor signals. At every communication instant, agents update their reference positions from these aggregates, and track the references in continuous time between updates. The only assumption on the agent dynamics is that each agent tracks constant reference positions exponentially, which accommodates a broad class of platforms. Under this assumption, we analyze the resulting jump-flow system under time-varying communication graphs and unknown channel coefficients. We derive a communication-rate based sufficient condition that guarantees convergence to a prescribed formation. We then provide a geometry-aware refinement showing how favorable tracking transients can relax the required condition. Simulations with unicycle agents illustrate the theoretical results and demonstrate a substantial reduction in the number of required orthogonal transmissions compared to interference-avoiding node-to-node communication protocols.

We present nlm, a set of Max externals that enable efficient real-time non-linear modal synthesis for strings, membranes, and plates. The externals, implemented in C++, offer interactive control of physical parameters, allow the loading of custom modal data, and provide multichannel output. By integrating interactive physical-modelling capabilities into a familiar environment, nlm lowers the barrier for composers, performers, and sound designers to explore the expressive potential of non-linear modal synthesis. The externals are available as open-source software at https://github.com/rodrigodzf/nlm.

In modern wireless networks, radio channels serve a dual role. Whilst their primary function is to carry bits of information from a transmitter to a receiver, the intrinsic sensitivity of transmitted signals to the physical structure of the environment makes the channel a powerful source of knowledge about the world. In this paper, we consider an agent that learns about its environment using a quantum sensing probe, optimised using a quantum circuit, which interacts with the radio-frequency (RF) electromagnetic field. We use data obtained from a ray-tracer to train the quantum circuit and learning model and we provide extensive experiments under realistic conditions on a localisation task. We show that using quantum sensors to learn from radio signals can enable intelligent systems that require no channel measurements at deployment, remain sensitive to weak and obstructed RF signals, and can learn about the world despite operating with strictly less information than classical baselines.

Timing degradation in SRAM-based FPGAs arises from multiple physical mechanisms that manifest differently in the routing fabric, most notably power-distribution-network (PDN) marginality and configuration-induced routing perturbations. Existing in-situ timing monitors provide limited insight into the physical origin, spatial structure, or statistical characteristics of the degradation. This paper presents a scalable in-situ timing diagnosis architecture that enables fine-grained, routing-aware characterization of timing behavior directly within the FPGA fabric during normal operation. The proposed approach combines non-intrusive delay taps placed at routing switch-matrix boundaries with distributed phase-swept delay monitoring elements and centralized statistical analysis. By extracting probabilistic delay distributions rather than binary timing margins, the framework captures both mean delay shifts and timing variability across spatially distributed routing locations. Experimental results obtained on a modern SRAM-based FPGA show that PDN-induced timing degradation produces globally correlated delay shifts with minimal change in variance, whereas routing-induced perturbations exhibit localized, topology-dependent delay growth and increased timing dispersion. Spatial correlation analysis and two-dimensional correlation heatmaps further reveal distinct signatures that enable systematic differentiation between these mechanisms. The presented architecture operates concurrently with an active user design and does not require external instrumentation, radiation sources, or design modification. These results establish a practical foundation for in-situ timing diagnosis, reliability assessment, and architecture-aware timing management in large FPGA-based systems.

Recent progress in learning-based image compression has demonstrated that end-to-end optimization can substantially outperform traditional codecs by jointly learning compact latent representations and probabilistic entropy models. However, many existing approaches achieve high rate-distortion efficiency at the expense of increased computational cost and limited parallelism. This paper presents ARCHE - Autoregressive Residual Compression with Hyperprior and Excitation, an end-to-end learned image compression framework that balances modeling accuracy and computational efficiency. The proposed architecture unifies hierarchical, spatial, and channel-based priors within a single probabilistic framework, capturing both global and local dependencies in the latent representation of the image, while employing adaptive feature recalibration and residual refinement to enhance latent representation quality. Without relying on recurrent or transformer-based components, ARCHE attains state-of-the-art rate-distortion efficiency: it reduces the BD-Rate by approximately 48% relative to the commonly used benchmark model of Balle et al., 30% relative to the channel-wise autoregressive model of Minnen & Singh and 5% against the VVC Intra codec on the Kodak benchmark dataset. The framework maintains computational efficiency with 95M parameters and 222ms running time per image. Visual comparisons confirm sharper textures and improved color fidelity, particularly at lower bit rates, demonstrating that accurate entropy modeling can be achieved through efficient convolutional designs suitable for practical deployment.

Explainable speech quality assessment requires moving beyond Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) to analyze underlying perceptual dimensions. To address this, we introduce a novel post-training method that tailors the foundational Audio Large Language Model for multidimensional reasoning, detection and classification of audio artifacts. First, a calibration stage aligns the model to predict predefined perceptual dimensions. Second, a reinforcement learning stage leverages Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with dimension-specific rewards to heavily enhance accuracy of descriptions and temporal localization of quality issues. With this approach we reach state-of-the-art results of 0.71 mean PCC score on the multidimensional QualiSpeech benchmark and 13% improvement in MOS prediction driven by RL-based reasoning. Furthermore, our fine-grained GRPO rewards substantially advance the model's ability to pinpoint and classify audio artifacts in time.