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Electrical Engineering and Systems Science

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Friday 13 March

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Period-aware asymptotic gain with application to a periodically forced synchronization circuit

The classical asymptotic gain (AG) is a concept known from the input-to-state stability theory. Given a uniform input bound, AG estimates the asymptotic bound of the output. Sometimes, however, more information is known about the input than just a bound. In this paper we consider the case of a periodic input. Under the assumption that the system converges to a periodic solution, we introduce a new gain, called period-aware asymptotic gain (PAG), which employs periodicity to enable a sharper asymptotic estimation of the output. Since the PAG can distinguish between short-period ("high-frequency") and long-period ("low-frequency") signals, it is able to rigorously quantify such properties as bandwidth, resonant behavior, and high-frequency damping. We discuss how the PAG can be computed and illustrate it with a numerical example from the field of power electronics.
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Signal Processing

A Learnable SIM Paradigm: Fundamentals, Training Techniques, and Applications

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) represent a breakthrough in wireless hardware by comprising multilayer, programmable metasurfaces capable of analog computing in the electromagnetic (EM) wave domain. By examining their architectural analogies, this article reveals a deeper connection between SIMs and artificial neural networks (ANNs). Leveraging this profound structural similarity, this work introduces a learnable SIM architecture and proposes a learnable SIM-based machine learning (ML) paradigm for sixth-generation (6G)-andbeyond systems. Then, we develop two SIM-empowered wireless signal processing schemes to effectively achieve multi-user signal separation and distinguish communication signals from jamming signals. The use cases highlight that the proposed SIM-enabled signal processing system can significantly enhance spectrum utilization efficiency and anti-jamming capability in a lightweight manner and pave the way for ultra-efficient and intelligent wireless infrastructures.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Response-Aware Risk-Constrained Control Barrier Function With Application to Vehicles

This paper proposes a unified control framework based on Response-Aware Risk-Constrained Control Barrier Function for dynamic safety boundary control of vehicles. Addressing the problem of physical model parameter mismatch, the framework constructs an uncertainty propagation model that fuses nominal dynamics priors with direct vehicle body responses. Utilizing simplified single-track dynamics to provide a baseline direction for control gradients and covering model deviations through statistical analysis of body response signals, the framework eliminates the dependence on accurate online estimation of road surface adhesion coefficients. By introducing Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) theory, the framework reformulates traditional deterministic safety constraints into probabilistic constraints on the tail risk of barrier function derivatives. Combined with a Bayesian online learning mechanism based on inverse Wishart priors, it identifies environmental noise covariance in real-time, adaptively tuning safety margins to reduce performance loss under prior parameter mismatch. Finally, based on Control Lyapunov Function (CLF), a unified Second-Order Cone Programming (SOCP) controller is constructed. Theoretical analysis establishes convergence of Sequential Convex Programming to local Karush-Kuhn-Tucker points and provides per-step probabilistic safety bounds. High-fidelity dynamics simulations demonstrate that under extreme conditions, the method not only eliminates the output divergence phenomenon of traditional methods but also achieves Pareto improvement in both safety and tracking performance. For the chosen risk level, the per-step safety violation probability is theoretically bounded by approximately 2%, validated through high-fidelity simulations showing zero boundary violations across all tested scenarios.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.IT

JCAS-MARL: Joint Communication and Sensing UAV Networks via Resource-Constrained Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Multi-UAV networks are increasingly deployed for large-scale inspection and monitoring missions, where operational performance depends on the coordination of sensing reliability, communication quality, and energy constraints. In particular, the rapid increase in overflowing waste bins and illegal dumping sites has created a need for efficient detection of waste hotspots. In this work, we introduce JCAS-MARL, a resource-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for joint communication and sensing (JCAS)-enabled UAV networks. Within this framework, multiple UAVs operate in a shared environment where each agent jointly controls its trajectory and the resource allocation of an OFDM waveform used simultaneously for sensing and communication. Battery consumption, charging behavior, and associated CO$_2$ emissions are incorporated into the system state to model realistic operational constraints. Information sharing occurs over a dynamic communication graph determined by UAV positions and wireless channel conditions. Waste hotspot detection requires consensus among multiple UAVs to improve reliability. Using this environment, we investigate how MARL policies exploit the sensing-communication-energy trade-off in JCAS-enabled UAV networks. Simulation results demonstrate that adaptive pilot-density control learned by the agents can outperform static configurations, particularly in scenarios where sensing accuracy and communication connectivity vary across the environment.
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Image and Video Processing

MiSiSUn: Minimum Simplex Semisupervised Unmixing

This paper proposes a semisupervised geometric unmixing approach called minimum simplex semisupervised unmixing (MiSiSUn). The geometry of the data was incorporated for the first time into library-based unmixing using a simplex-volume-flavored penalty based on an archetypal analysis-type linear model. The experimental results were performed on two simulated datasets considering different levels of mixing ratios and spatial instruction at varying input noise. MiSiSUn considerably outperforms state-of-the-art semisupervised unmixing methods. The improvements vary from 1 dB to over 3 dB in different scenarios. The proposed method was also applied to a real dataset where visual interpretation is close to the geological map. MiSiSUn was implemented using PyTorch, which is open-source and available at https://github.com/BehnoodRasti/MiSiSUn. Moreover, we provide a dedicated Python package for Semisupervised Unmixing, which is open-source and includes all the methods used in the experiments for the sake of reproducibility.
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Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Leveraging Large Vision Model for Multi-UAV Co-perception in Low-Altitude Wireless Networks

Multi-uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) cooperative perception has emerged as a promising paradigm for diverse low-altitude economy applications, where complementary multi-view observations are leveraged to enhance perception performance via wireless communications. However, the massive visual data generated by multiple UAVs poses significant challenges in terms of communication latency and resource efficiency. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a communication-efficient cooperative perception framework, termed Base-Station-Helped UAV (BHU), which reduces communication overhead while enhancing perception performance. Specifically, we employ a Top-K selection mechanism to identify the most informative pixels from UAV-captured RGB images, enabling sparsified visual transmission with reduced data volume and latency. The sparsified images are transmitted to a ground server via multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO), where a Swin-large-based MaskDINO encoder extracts bird's-eye-view (BEV) features and performs cooperative feature fusion for ground vehicle perception. Furthermore, we develop a diffusion model-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm to jointly select cooperative UAVs, sparsification ratios, and precoding matrices, achieving a balance between communication efficiency and perception utility. Simulation results on the Air-Co-Pred dataset demonstrate that, compared with traditional CNN-based BEV fusion baselines, the proposed BHU framework improves perception performance by over 5% while reducing communication overhead by 85%, providing an effective solution for multi-UAV cooperative perception under resource-constrained wireless environments.
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All authors Yunting Xu, Jiacheng Wang, Ruichen Zhang, Changyuan Zhao, Yinqiu Liu, Dusit Niyato, Liang Yu, Haibo Zhou, Dong In Kim

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

Music Source Restoration with Ensemble Separation and Targeted Reconstruction

The Inaugural Music Source Restoration (MSR) Challenge targets the recovery of original, unprocessed stems from fully mixed and mastered music. Unlike conventional music source separation, MSR requires reversing complex production processes such as equalization, compression, reverberation, and other real-world degradations. To address MSR, we propose a two-stage system. First, an ensemble of pre-trained separation models produces preliminary source estimates. Then a set of pre-trained BSRNN-based restoration models performs targeted reconstruction to refine these estimates. On the official MSR benchmark, our system surpasses the baselines on all metrics, ranking second among all submissions. The code is available at https://github.com/xinghour/Music-source-restoration-CUPAudioGroup
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Systems and Control

A Lyapunov Characterization of Robust D-Stability with Application to Decentralized Integral Control of LTI Systems

The concept of matrix D-stability plays an important role in applications, ranging from economic and biological system models to decentralized control. Here we provide necessary and sufficient Lyapunov-type conditions for the robust (block) D-stability property. We leverage this characterization as part of a novel Lyapunov analysis of decentralized integral control for MIMO LTI systems, providing sufficient conditions guaranteeing stability under low-gain and under arbitrary connection and disconnection of individual control loops.
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Signal Processing

Expressivity of Programmable-Metasurface-Based Physical Neural Networks: Encoding Non-Linearity, Structural Non-Linearity, and Depth

Wave-based signal processing conventionally encodes input data into the input wavefront, making it challenging to implement non-linear operations. Programmable wave systems enable an alternative approach: encoding the input data into the scattering properties of tunable components. With such structural input encoding, two potentially non-linear mappings are involved: first, from the input data to the tunable components' scattering characteristics, and, second, from these scattering characteristics to the output wavefront. In this paper, we systematically examine the expressivity of a wave-based physical neural network (WPNN) with structural input encoding. Our analysis is based on a physics-consistent multiport-network model of a compact D-band rich-scattering cavity parametrized by a 100-element programmable metasurface. We separately control encoding non-linearity, structural non-linearity, and network depth in order to examine their interplay, considering a controlled scalar regression task. With phase encoding and strong inter-element mutual coupling (MC), both aforementioned mappings are strongly non-linear and the WPNN performs very well even with a single layer. We further observe that additional layers can partially compensate for weak inter-element MC. In addition, we demonstrate that WPNN depth can improve expressivity even when it is not associated with an increase in trainable weights. Altogether, our results provide a physics-consistent picture of how encoding choice, MC strength, and depth jointly govern the expressive power of PM-based WPNNs, informing design choices for future experimental implementations of WPNNs.
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All authors Cheima Hammami, Luc Le Magoarou, Christos Monochristou, David González-Ovejero, Ali Momeni, Romain Fleury, Philipp del Hougne

Image and Video Processing

DQ-Ladder: A Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Bitrate Ladder for Adaptive Video Streaming

Adaptive streaming of segmented video over HTTP typically relies on a predefined set of bitrate-resolution pairs, known as a bitrate ladder. However, fixed ladders often overlook variations in content and decoding complexities, leading to suboptimal trade-offs between encoding time, decoding efficiency, and video quality. This article introduces DQ-Ladder, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based scheme for constructing time- and quality-aware bitrate ladders for adaptive video streaming applications. DQ-Ladder employs predicted decoding time, quality scores, and bitrate levels per segment as inputs to a Deep Q-Network (DQN) agent, guided by a weighted reward function of decoding time, video quality, and resolution smoothness. We leverage machine learning models to predict decoding time, bitrate level, and objective quality metrics (VMAF, XPSNR), eliminating the need for exhaustive encoding or quality metric computation. We evaluate DQ-Ladder using the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) toolchain (VVenC/VVdeC) on 750 video sequences across six Apple HLS-compliant resolutions and 41 quantization parameters. Experimental results against four baselines show that DQ-Ladder achieves BD-rate reductions of at least 10.3% for XPSNR compared to the HLS ladder, while reducing decoding time by 22%. DQ-Ladder shows significantly lower sensitivity to prediction errors than competing methods, remaining robust even with up to 20% noise.
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All authors Reza Farahani, Zoha Azimi, Vignesh V Menon, Hermann Hellwagner, Radu Prodan, Schahram Dustdar, Christian Timmerer

Signal Processing

Extended Target Sensing in MIMO-OFDM ISAC Systems: Modeling, Optimization and Estimation

This paper develops a comprehensive target modeling, beamforming optimization, and parameter estimation framework for extended-target sensing in wideband MIMO-OFDM integrated sensing and communication systems. We propose a parametric scattering model (PSM) that decouples target geometry from electromagnetic scattering characteristics, requiring only six nonlinear geometric parameters and linear radar cross-section (RCS) coefficients. Based on this compact structure, we derive a hybrid Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for joint estimation of azimuth, elevation, and range-related parameters. To handle inherent range ambiguities due to OFDM signaling, we analyze the range ambiguity function and introduce range sidelobe suppression constraints around the true range. Based on these constraints, we formulate an ambiguity-aware transmit beamforming design that minimizes a weighted geometric CRB subject to per-user signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements and a total power budget. As benchmarks, we extend two other common models to the same wideband MIMO-OFDM scenario. We also derive maximum a posteriori estimators and a computational complexity analysis for all three models. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PSM-based approach achieves improved target localization with significantly reduced runtime for beamforming optimization and parameter estimation, while consistently satisfying communication SINR requirements.
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Signal Processing

Task-Oriented Wireless Transmission of 3D Point Clouds: Geometric Versus Semantic Robustness

Wireless transmission of high-dimensional 3D point clouds (PCs) is increasingly required in industrial collaborative robotics systems. Conventional compression methods prioritize geometric fidelity, although many practical applications ultimately depend on reliable task-level inference rather than exact coordinate reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end semantic communication framework for wireless 3D PC transmission and conduct a systematic study of the relationship between geometric reconstruction fidelity and semantic robustness under channel impairments. The proposed architecture jointly supports geometric recovery and object classification from a shared transmitted representation, enabling direct comparison between coordinate-level and task-level sensitivity to noise. Experimental evaluation on a real industrial dataset reveals a pronounced asymmetry: semantic inference remains stable across a broad signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) range even when geometric reconstruction quality degrades significantly. These results demonstrate that reliable task execution does not require high-fidelity geometric recovery and provide design insights for task-oriented wireless perception systems in bandwidth- and power-constrained industrial environments.
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All authors Vukan Ninkovic, Tamara Sobot, Vladimir Vincan, Gorana Gojic, Dragisa Miskovic, Dejan Vukobratovic

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from stat.ML

Robust Automatic Differentiation of Square-Root Kalman Filters via Gramian Differentials

Square-root Kalman filters propagate state covariances in Cholesky-factor form for numerical stability, and are a natural target for gradient-based parameter learning in state-space models. Their core operation, triangularization of a matrix $M \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times m}$, is computed via a QR decomposition in practice, but naively differentiating through it causes two problems: the semi-orthogonal factor is non-unique when $m > n$, yielding undefined gradients; and the standard Jacobian formula involves inverses, which diverges when $M$ is rank-deficient. Both are resolved by the observation that all filter outputs relevant to learning depend on the input matrix only through the Gramian $MM^\top$, so the composite loss is smooth in $M$ even where the triangularization is not. We derive a closed-form chain-rule directly from the differential of this Gramian identity, prove it exact for the Kalman log-marginal likelihood and filtered moments, and extend it to rank-deficient inputs via a two-component decomposition: a column-space term based on the Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse, and a null-space correction for perturbations outside the column space of $M$.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Hybrid topology control: a dynamic leader-based distributed edge-addition and deletion mechanism

Coordinated operations of multi-robot systems (MRS) require agents to maintain communication connections to accomplish team objectives. However, maintaining the connections imposes costs in terms of restricted robot mobility, resulting in suboptimal team performance. In this work, we consider a realistic MRS framework in which agents are subject to unknown dynamical disturbances and experience communication delays. Most existing works on connectivity maintenance use consensus-based frameworks for graph reconfiguration, where decision-making time scales with the number of nodes and requires multiple rounds of communication, making them ineffective under communication delays. To address this, we propose a novel leader-based decision-making algorithm that uses a central node for efficient real-time reconfiguration, reducing decision-making time to depend on the graph diameter rather than the number of nodes and requiring only one round of information transfer through the network. We propose a novel method for estimating robot locations within the MRS that actively accounts for unknown disturbances and the communication delays. Using these position estimates, the central node selects a set of edges to delete while allowing the formation of new edges, aiming to keep the diameter of the new graph within a threshold. We provide numerous simulation results to showcase the efficacy of the proposed method.
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Audio and Speech Processing

VoXtream2: Full-stream TTS with dynamic speaking rate control

Full-stream text-to-speech (TTS) for interactive systems must start speaking with minimal delay while remaining controllable as text arrives incrementally. We present VoXtream2, a zero-shot full-stream TTS model with dynamic speaking-rate control that can be updated mid-utterance on the fly. VoXtream2 combines a distribution matching mechanism over duration states with classifier-free guidance across conditioning signals to improve controllability and synthesis quality. Prompt-text masking enables textless audio prompting, removing the need for prompt transcription. Across standard zero-shot benchmarks and a dedicated speaking-rate test set, VoXtream2 achieves competitive objective and subjective results against public baselines despite a smaller model and less training data. In full-stream mode, it runs 4 times faster than real time with 74 ms first-packet latency on a consumer GPU.
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Systems and Control

Verification and Forward Invariance of Control Barrier Functions for Differential-Algebraic Systems

Differential-algebraic equations (DAEs) arise in power networks, chemical processes, and multibody systems, where algebraic constraints encode physical conservation laws. The safety of such systems is critical, yet safe control is challenging because algebraic constraints restrict allowable state trajectories. Control barrier functions (CBFs) provide computationally efficient safety filters for ordinary differential equation (ODE) systems. However, existing CBF methods are not directly applicable to DAEs due to potential conflicts between the CBF condition and the constraint manifold. This paper introduces DAE-aware CBFs that incorporate the differential-algebraic structure through projected vector fields. We derive conditions that ensure forward invariance of safe sets while preserving algebraic constraints and extend the framework to higher-index DAEs. A systematic verification framework is developed, establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for geometric correctness and feasibility of DAE-aware CBFs. For polynomial systems, sum-of-squares certificates are provided, while for nonpolynomial and neural network candidates, satisfiability modulo theories are used for falsification. The approach is validated on wind turbine and flexible-link manipulator systems.
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All authors Hongchao Zhang, Mohamad H. Kazma, Meiyi Ma, Taylor T. Johnson, Ahmad F. Taha

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Safety-aware Goal-oriented Semantic Sensing, Communication, and Control for Robotics

Wirelessly-connected robotic systems empower robots with real-time intelligence by leveraging remote computing resources for decision-making. However, the data exchange between robots and edge servers often overwhelms communication links, introducing latency that degrades task performance. To tackle this, goal-oriented semantic communication (GSC) has been introduced for wirelessly-connected robotic systems to extract and transmit only goal-relevant semantic representations. While this improves task effectiveness, it generally overlooks practical safety requirements. Meanwhile, existing robotics research often treats safety primarily as a control-level problem, without systematically considering safety across sensing, communication, and control in a closed-loop manner. To bridge this gap, we investigate how to enable safety-aware goal-oriented semantic (SA-GS) sensing, communication, and control co-design in wirelessly-connected robotic systems, aiming to maximize the robotic task effectiveness subject to practical safety requirements. We first introduce {an} architecture {for} wirelessly-connected robotic systems and representative use cases. We then summarize general safety requirements and effectiveness metrics across the use cases. Next, we systematically analyze the unique safety and effectiveness challenges in sensing, communication, and control. Based on these, we further present potential SA-GS research directions. Finally, an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) target tracking case study validates that one of the presented SA-GS research directions, i.e., semantic-based C&C packet execution, could significantly improve safety rate and tracking success rate by more than 2 times and 4.5 times, respectively.
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All authors Wenchao Wu, Shutong Chen, Wenjie Liu, Zhibo Pang, Yansha Deng, Robert Schober

Audio and Speech Processing

Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of SSL models for audio deepfake model attribution

Audio deepfake model attribution aims to mitigate the misuse of synthetic speech by identifying the source model responsible for generating a given audio sample, enabling accountability and informing vendors. The task is challenging, but self-supervised learning (SSL)-derived acoustic features have demonstrated state-of-the-art attribution capabilities, yet the underlying factors driving their success and the limits of their discriminative power remain unclear. In this paper, we systematically investigate how SSL-derived features capture architectural signatures in audio deepfakes. By controlling multiple dimensions of the audio generation process we reveal how subtle perturbations in model checkpoints, text prompts, vocoders, or speaker identity influence attribution. Our results provide new insights into the robustness, biases, and limitations of SSL-based deepfake attribution, highlighting both its strengths and vulnerabilities in realistic scenarios.
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Image and Video Processing

Open World MRI Reconstruction with Bias-Calibrated Adaptation

Real-world MRI reconstruction systems face the open-world challenge: test data from unseen imaging centers, anatomical structures, or acquisition protocols can differ drastically from training data, causing severe performance degradation. Existing methods struggle with this challenge. To address this, we propose BiasRecon, a bias-calibrated adaptation framework grounded in the minimal intervention principle: preserve what transfers, calibrate what does not. Concretely, BiasRecon formulates open-world adaptation as an alternating optimization framework that jointly optimizes three components: (1) frequency-guided prior calibration that introduces layer-wise calibration variables to selectively modulate frequency-specific features of the pre-trained score network via self-supervised k-space signals, (2) score-based denoising that leverages the calibrated generative prior for high-fidelity image reconstruction, and (3) adaptive regularization that employs Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimator to dynamically balance the prior-measurement trade-off, matching test-time noise characteristics without requiring ground truth. By intervening minimally and precisely through this alternating scheme, BiasRecon achieves robust adaptation with fewer than 100 tunable parameters. Extensive experiments across four datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on open-world reconstruction tasks.
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All authors Jiyao Liu, Shangqi Gao, Lihao Liu, Junzhi Ning, Jinjie Wei, Junjun He, Xiahai Zhuang, Ningsheng Xu

Image and Video Processing

MGMAR: Metal-Guided Metal Artifact Reduction for X-ray Computed Tomography

An X-ray computed tomography (CT), metal artifact reduction (MAR) remains a major challenge because metallic implants violate standard CT forward-model assumptions, producing severe streaking and shadowing artifacts that degrade diagnostic quality. We propose MGMAR, a metal-guided MAR method that explicitly leverages metal-related information throughout the reconstruction pipeline. MGMAR first generates a high-quality prior image by training a conditioned implicit neural representation (INR) using metal-unaffected projections, and then incorporates this prior into a normalized MAR (NMAR) framework for projection completion. To improve robustness under severe metal corruption, we pretrain the encoder-conditioned INR on paired metal-corrupted and artifact-free CT images, thereby embedding data-driven prior knowledge into the INR parameter space. This prior-embedded initialization reduces sensitivity to random initialization and accelerates convergence during measurement-specific refinement. The encoder takes a metal-corrupted reconstruction together with a recursively constructed metal artifact image, enabling the latent field to capture metal-dependent global artifact patterns. After projection completion using the INR prior, we further suppress residual artifacts using a metal-conditioned correction network, where the metal mask modulates intermediate features via adaptive instance normalization to target metal-dependent secondary artifacts while preserving anatomical structures. Experiments on the public AAPM-MAR benchmark demonstrate that MGMAR achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining an average final score of 0.89 on 29 clinical test cases.
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Image and Video Processing

Bayesian Uncertainty-Aware MRI Reconstruction

We propose a novel framework for joint magnetic resonance image reconstruction and uncertainty quantification using under-sampled k-space measurements. The problem is formulated as a Bayesian linear inverse problem, where prior distributions are assigned to the unknown model parameters. Specifically, we assume the target image is sparse in its spatial gradient and impose a total variation prior model. A Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, based on a split-and-augmented Gibbs sampler, is then used to sample from the resulting joint posterior distribution of the unknown parameters. Experiments conducted using single- and multi-coil datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework over optimisation-based compressed sensing algorithms. Additionally, our framework effectively quantifies uncertainty, showing strong correlation with error maps computed from reconstructed and ground-truth images.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Vision-Language Based Expert Reporting for Painting Authentication and Defect Detection

Authenticity and condition assessment are central to conservation decision-making, yet interpretation and reporting of thermographic output remain largely bespoke and expert-dependent, complicating comparison across collections and limiting systematic integration into conservation documentation. Pulsed Active Infrared Thermography (AIRT) is sensitive to subsurface features such as material heterogeneity, voids, and past interventions; however, its broader adoption is constrained by artifact misinterpretation, inter-laboratory variability, and the absence of standardized, explainable reporting frameworks. Although multi-modal thermographic processing techniques are established, their integration with structured natural-language interpretation has not been explored in cultural heritage. A fully automated thermography-vision-language model (VLM) framework is presented. It combines multi-modal AIRT analysis with modality-aware textual reporting, without human intervention during inference. Thermal sequences are processed using Principal Component Thermography (PCT), Thermographic Signal Reconstruction (TSR), and Pulsed Phase Thermography (PPT), and the resulting anomaly masks are fused into a consensus segmentation that emphasizes regions supported by multiple thermal indicators while mitigating boundary artifacts. The fused evidence is provided to a VLM, which generates structured reports describing the location of the anomaly, thermal behavior, and plausible physical interpretations while explicitly acknowledging the uncertainty and diagnostic limitations. Evaluation on two marquetries demonstrates consistent anomaly detection and stable structured interpretations, indicating reproducibility and generalizability across samples.
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All authors Eman Ouda, Mohammed Salah, Arsenii O. Chulkov, Gianfranco Gargiulo, Gian Luca Tartaglia, Stefano Sfarra, Yusra Abdulrahman

Audio and Speech Processing

Bounds on Agreement between Subjective and Objective Measurements

Objective estimators of multimedia quality are often judged by comparing estimates with subjective "truth data," most often via Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) or mean-squared error (MSE). But subjective test results contain noise, so striving for a PCC of 1.0 or an MSE of 0.0 is neither realistic nor repeatable. Numerous efforts have been made to acknowledge and appropriately accommodate subjective test noise in objective-subjective comparisons, typically resulting in new analysis frameworks and figures-of-merit. We take a different approach. By making only basic assumptions, we derive bounds on PCC and MSE that can be expected for a subjective test. Consistent with intuition, these bounds are functions of subjective vote variance. When a subjective test includes vote variance information, the calculation of the bounds is easy, and in this case we say the resulting bounds are "fully data-driven." We provide two options for calculating bounds in cases where vote variance information is not available. One option is to use vote variance information from other subjective tests that do provide such information, and the second option is to use a model for subjective votes. Thus we introduce a binomial-based model for subjective votes (BinoVotes) that naturally leads to a mean opinion score (MOS) model, named BinoMOS, with multiple unique desirable properties. BinoMOS reproduces the discrete nature of MOS values and its dependence on the number of votes per file. This modeling provides vote variance information required by the PCC and MSE bounds and we compare this modeling with data from 18 subjective tests. The modeling yields PCC and MSE bounds that agree very well with those found from the data directly. These results allow one to set expectations for the PCC and MSE that might be achieved for any subjective test, even those where vote variance information is not available.
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Image and Video Processing

DiT-IC: Aligned Diffusion Transformer for Efficient Image Compression

Diffusion-based image compression has recently shown outstanding perceptual fidelity, yet its practicality is hindered by prohibitive sampling overhead and high memory usage. Most existing diffusion codecs employ U-Net architectures, where hierarchical downsampling forces diffusion to operate in shallow latent spaces (typically with only 8x spatial downscaling), resulting in excessive computation. In contrast, conventional VAE-based codecs work in much deeper latent domains (16x - 64x downscaled), motivating a key question: Can diffusion operate effectively in such compact latent spaces without compromising reconstruction quality? To address this, we introduce DiT-IC, an Aligned Diffusion Transformer for Image Compression, which replaces the U-Net with a Diffusion Transformer capable of performing diffusion in latent space entirely at 32x downscaled resolution. DiT-IC adapts a pretrained text-to-image multi-step DiT into a single-step reconstruction model through three key alignment mechanisms: (1) a variance-guided reconstruction flow that adapts denoising strength to latent uncertainty for efficient reconstruction; (2) a self-distillation alignment that enforces consistency with encoder-defined latent geometry to enable one-step diffusion; and (3) a latent-conditioned guidance that replaces text prompts with semantically aligned latent conditions, enabling text-free inference. With these designs, DiT-IC achieves state-of-the-art perceptual quality while offering up to 30x faster decoding and drastically lower memory usage than existing diffusion-based codecs. Remarkably, it can reconstruct 2048x2048 images on a 16 GB laptop GPU.
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All authors Junqi Shi, Ming Lu, Xingchen Li, Anle Ke, Ruiqi Zhang, Zhan Ma

Systems and Control

Unifying Decision Making and Trajectory Planning in Automated Driving through Time-Varying Potential Fields

This paper proposes a unified decision making and local trajectory planning framework based on Time-Varying Artificial Potential Fields (TVAPFs). The TVAPF explicitly models the predicted motion via bounded uncertainty of dynamic obstacles over the planning horizon, using information from perception and V2X sources when available. TVAPFs are embedded into a finite horizon optimal control problem that jointly selects the driving maneuver and computes a feasible, collision free trajectory. The effectiveness and real-time suitability of the approach are demonstrated through a simulation test in a multi-actor scenario with real road topology, highlighting the advantages of the unified TVAPF-based formulation.
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All authors David Costa, Francesco Cerrito, Massimo Canale, Carlo Novara

Signal Processing

AirGuard: UAV and Bird Recognition Scheme for Integrated Sensing and Communications System

In this paper, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and bird recognition scheme with signal processing and deep learning for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system. We first provide the basic scene of low-altitude targets monitoring, and formulate the motion equations and echo signals for UAVs and birds. Next, we extract the centralized micro-Doppler (cmD) spectrum and the high resolution range profile (HRRP) of the low-altitude target from the echo signals. Then we design a dual feature fusion enabled low-altitude target recognition network with convolutional neural network (CNN), which employs both the images of cmD spectrum and HRRP as inputs to jointly distinguish between UAV and bird. Meanwhile, we generate 237600 cmD and HRRP image samples to train, validate, and evaluate the designed low-altitude target recognition network. The proposed scheme is termed as AirGuard, whose effectiveness has been demonstrated by simulation results.
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All authors Hongliang Luo, Zhonghua Chu, Tengyu Zhang, Chuanbin Zhao, Bo Lin, Feifei Gao

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

Panoramic Multimodal Semantic Occupancy Prediction for Quadruped Robots

Panoramic imagery provides holistic 360{\deg} visual coverage for environmental perception in quadruped robots. However, existing occupancy prediction methods are primarily designed for wheeled autonomous driving and rely heavily on RGB cues, which limits their robustness in complex, dynamically changing environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce PanoMMOcc, the first real-world panoramic multimodal occupancy dataset for quadruped robots, comprising four sensing modalities collected across diverse scenes. We further propose VoxelHound, a panoramic multimodal occupancy perception framework tailored to legged locomotion and spherical imaging. VoxelHound incorporates a Vertical Jitter Compensation (VJC) module to mitigate severe viewpoint perturbations caused by body pitch and roll during locomotion, enabling more consistent spatial reasoning, and a Multimodal Information Prompt Fusion (MIPF) module to effectively integrate panoramic visual cues with auxiliary modalities for enhanced volumetric occupancy prediction. We also establish a comprehensive benchmark on PanoMMOcc and provide detailed dataset analyses to enable systematic evaluation in challenging embodied perception scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VoxelHound achieves state-of-the-art performance on PanoMMOcc, with a +4.16 gain in mIoU. The dataset and code will be publicly released to facilitate future research on panoramic multimodal 3D perception for embodied robotic systems at https://github.com/SXDR/PanoMMOcc.
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All authors Guoqiang Zhao, Zhe Yang, Sheng Wu, Fei Teng, Mengfei Duan, Yuanfan Zheng, Kai Luo, Kailun Yang

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

InterEdit: Navigating Text-Guided 3D Dyadic Human Motion Editing

Text-guided 3D motion editing has seen success in single-person scenarios, but its extension to multi-person settings is less explored due to limited paired data and the complexity of inter-person interactions. We introduce the task of multi-person 3D motion editing, where a target motion is generated from a source and a text instruction. To support this, we propose InterEdit3D, a new dataset with manual two-person motion change annotations, and a Text-guided Multi-human Motion Editing (TMME) benchmark. We present InterEdit, a synchronized classifier-free conditional diffusion model for TMME. It introduces Semantic-Aware Plan Token Alignment with learnable tokens to capture high-level interaction cues and an Interaction-Aware Frequency Token Alignment strategy using DCT and energy pooling to model periodic motion dynamics. Experiments show that InterEdit improves text-to-motion consistency and edit fidelity, achieving state-of-the-art TMME performance. The dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/YNG916/InterEdit.
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All authors Yebin Yang, Di Wen, Lei Qi, Weitong Kong, Junwei Zheng, Ruiping Liu, Yufan Chen, Chengzhi Wu, Kailun Yang, Yuqian Fu, Danda Pani Paudel, Luc Van Gool, Kunyu Peng

Systems and Control

EMT and RMS Modeling of Thyristor Rectifiers for Stability Analysis of Converter-Based Systems

Thyristor rectifiers are a well-established and cost-effective solution for controlled high-power rectification, commonly used for hydrogen electrolysis and HVDC transmission. However, small-signal modeling and analysis of thyristor rectifiers remain challenging due to their line-commutated operation and nonlinear switching dynamics. This paper first revisits conventional RMS-based modeling of thyristor rectifiers and subsequently proposes a novel nonlinear state-space EMT model in the dq domain that can be linearized for small-signal analysis. The proposed model accurately captures all the relevant dynamic phenomena, including PLL dynamics, the commutation process, and switching delays. It is derived in polar coordinates, offering novel insights into the impact of the PLL and commutation angle on the thyristor rectifier dynamics. We verify the RMS and EMT models against a detailed switching model and demonstrate their applicability through small-signal stability analysis of a modified IEEE 39-bus test system that incorporates thyristor rectifier-interfaced hydrogen electrolyzers, synchronous generators, and grid-forming converters.
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All authors Ognjen Stanojev, Pol Jane Soneira, Gösta Stomberg, Mario Schweizer

Signal Processing

Association-Aware GNN for Precoder Learning in Cell-Free Systems

Deep learning has been widely recognized as a promising approach for optimizing multi-user multi-antenna precoders in traditional cellular systems. However, a critical distinction between cell-free and cellular systems lies in the flexibility of user equipment (UE)-access point (AP) associations. Consequently, the optimal precoder depends not only on channel state information but also on the dynamic UE-AP association status. In this paper, we propose an association-aware graph neural network (AAGNN) that explicitly incorporates association status into the precoding design. We leverage the permutation equivariance properties of the cell-free precoding policy to reduce the training complexity of AAGNN and employ an attention mechanism to enhance its generalization performance. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed AAGNN outperforms baseline learning methods in both learning performance and generalization capabilities while maintaining low training and inference complexity.
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