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Electrical Engineering and Systems Science

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Thursday 26 March

Systems and Control

Time-Varying Reach-Avoid Control Certificates for Stochastic Systems

Reach-avoid analysis is fundamental to reasoning about the safety and goal-reaching behavior of dynamical systems, and serves as a foundation for specifying and verifying more complex control objectives. This paper introduces a reach-avoid certificate framework for discrete-time, continuous-space stochastic systems over both finite- and infinite-horizon settings. We propose two formulations: time-varying and time-invariant certificates. We also show how these certificates can be synthesized using sum-of-squares (SOS) optimization, providing a convex formulation for verifying a given controller. Furthermore, we present an SOS-based method for the joint synthesis of an optimal feedback controller and its corresponding reach-avoid certificate, enabling the maximization of the probability of reaching the target set while avoiding unsafe regions. Case studies and benchmark results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework in certifying and controlling stochastic systems with continuous state and action spaces.
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Signal Processing

Occlusion-Aware Multimodal Beam Prediction and Pose Estimation for mmWave V2I

We propose an occlusion-aware multimodal learning framework that is inspired by simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) concepts for trajectory interpretation and pose prediction. Targeting mmWave vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) beam management under dynamic blockage, our Transformer-based fusion network ingests synchronized RGB images, LiDAR point clouds, radar range-angle maps, GNSS, and short-term mmWave power history. It jointly predicts the receive beam index, blockage probability, and 2D position using labels automatically derived from 64-beam sweep power vectors, while an offline LiDAR map enables SLAM-style trajectory visualization. On the 60 GHz DeepSense 6G Scenario 31 dataset, the model achieves 50.92% Top-1 and 86.50% Top-3 beam accuracy with 0.018 bits/s/Hz spectral-efficiency loss, 63.35% blocked-class F1, and 1.33m position RMSE. Multimodal fusion outperforms radio-only and strong camera-only baselines, showing the value of coupling perception and communication for future 6G V2I systems.
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All authors Abidemi Orimogunje, Hyunwoo Park, Kyeong-Ju Cha, Igbafe Orikumhi, Sunwoo Kim, Dejan Vukobratovic

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

Unlocking Strong Supervision: A Data-Centric Study of General-Purpose Audio Pre-Training Methods

Current audio pre-training seeks to learn unified representations for broad audio understanding tasks, but it remains fragmented and is fundamentally bottlenecked by its reliance on weak, noisy, and scale-limited labels. Drawing lessons from vision's foundational pre-training blueprint, we argue that the audio field must first establish its own large-scale, strong supervision framework. We introduce a new data-centric pipeline that leverages a high-fidelity captioner to create SOTA-quality captions and the first Unified Tag System (UTS) that bridges speech, music, and environmental sounds. We then conduct a systematic comparative study of different pre-training objectives on these strong source data. Our experiments suggest that data quality and coverage are the primary drivers of performance, while the choice of objective dictates downstream task specialization.
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All authors Xuanru Zhou, Yiwen Shao, Wei-Cheng Tseng, Dong Yu

Image and Video Processing

Colon-Bench: An Agentic Workflow for Scalable Dense Lesion Annotation in Full-Procedure Colonoscopy Videos

Early screening via colonoscopy is critical for colon cancer prevention, yet developing robust AI systems for this domain is hindered by the lack of densely annotated, long-sequence video datasets. Existing datasets predominantly focus on single-class polyp detection and lack the rich spatial, temporal, and linguistic annotations required to evaluate modern Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). To address this critical gap, we introduce Colon-Bench, generated via a novel multi-stage agentic workflow. Our pipeline seamlessly integrates temporal proposals, bounding-box tracking, AI-driven visual confirmation, and human-in-the-loop review to scalably annotate full-procedure videos. The resulting verified benchmark is unprecedented in scope, encompassing 528 videos, 14 distinct lesion categories (including polyps, ulcers, and bleeding), over 300,000 bounding boxes, 213,000 segmentation masks, and 133,000 words of clinical descriptions. We utilize Colon-Bench to rigorously evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs across lesion classification, Open-Vocabulary Video Object Segmentation (OV-VOS), and video Visual Question Answering (VQA). The MLLM results demonstrate surprisingly high localization performance in medical domains compared to SAM-3. Finally, we analyze common VQA errors from MLLMs to introduce a novel "colon-skill" prompting strategy, improving zero-shot MLLM performance by up to 9.7% across most MLLMs. The dataset and the code are available at https://abdullahamdi.com/colon-bench .
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Signal Processing

A Ray-Based Characterization of Satellite-to-Urban Propagation

The evolution toward 6G communication systems is expected to rely on integrated three-dimensional network architectures where terrestrial infrastructures coexist with non-terrestrial stations such as satellites, enabling ubiquitous connectivity and service continuity. In this context, accurate channel models for satellite-to-ground propagation in urban environments are essential, particularly for user equipment located at street level where obstruction and multipath effects are significant. This work investigates satellite-to-urban propagation through deterministic ray-tracing simulations. Three representative urban layouts are considered, namely dense urban, urban, and suburban. Multiple use cases are investigated, including handheld devices, vehicular terminals, and fixed rooftop receivers operating across several frequency bands. The analysis focuses on the relative importance of competing propagation mechanisms and on four key channel parameters, namely shadowing standard deviation, Rician \(K\)-factor, delay spread and Doppler spread, which are relevant for the calibration of channel models to be used in link- and system-level simulations. Results show that elevation and receiver placement strongly shape fading and dispersion, antenna directivity affects shadowing differently under LoS and NLoS conditions, urban morphology produces nontrivial multipath trends, and terminal mobility largely governs Doppler spread.
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All authors Nicolò Cenni, Marina Barbiroli, Vittorio Degli-Esposti, Enrico M. Vitucci, Carla Amatetti, Franco Fuschini

Systems and Control

Parameter-interval estimation for cooperative reactive sputtering processes

Reactive sputtering is a plasma-based technique to deposit a thin film on a substrate. This contribution presents a novel parameter-interval estimation method for a well-established model that describes the uncertain and nonlinear reactive sputtering process behaviour. Building on a proposed monotonicity-based model classification, the method guarantees that all parameter values within the parameter interval yield output trajectories and static characteristics consistent with the enclosure induced by the parameter interval. Correctness and practical applicability of the new method are demonstrated by an experimental validation, which also reveals inherent structural limitations of the well-established process model for state-estimation tasks.
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Signal Processing

Intelligent Reflection as a Service (IRaaS): System Architecture, Enabling Technologies, and Deployment Strategy

Reflecting intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology for 6G mobile communications. However, identifying the niche of RIS within the mobile networks is a challenging task. To mitigate the escalating system complexity of mobile networks, we propose the concept of Intelligent Reflection as a Service (IRaaS), and discuss its system architecture, enabling technologies, and deployment strategy, respectively. By leveraging technologies such as resource pooling, service based architecture (SBA), cloud infrastructure, and model-free signal processing, IRaaS empowers telecom operators to deliver on-demand intelligent reflection services without a radical update of current communication protocols. In addition, IRaaS brings a novel deployment strategy that creates new opportunities for the vendors of intelligent reflection service and balances the interests of both telecom operators and property owners. IRaaS is expected to speed up the rollout of RIS from both technical perspective and commercial perspective, fostering an authentic smart radio environment for future mobile communications.
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Signal Processing

Challenge-Response Authentication for LEO Satellite Channels: Exploiting Orbit-Specific Uniqueness

The number of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations has grown rapidly in recent years, bringing a major change to global wireless communications. As LEO satellite links take on a growing role in critical services such as emergency communications, navigation, wide-area data collection, and military operations, keeping these links secure has become an important concern. In particular, verifying the identity of a satellite transmitter is now a basic requirement for protecting the services that rely on satellite access. In this article, we propose an active challenge-response authentication framework in which the verifier checks the satellite at randomly chosen times that are not known in advance, removing the fixed measurement window that existing passive methods expose to adversaries. The proposed framework uses the deterministic yet unpredictably sampled nature of orbital observables to establish a physics based root of trust for satellite identity authentication. This approach transforms satellite authentication from static feature matching into a spatiotemporal consistency verification problem inherently constrained by orbital dynamics, providing robust protection even against trajectory-aware spoofing attacks.
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Systems and Control

Physics-informed structured learning of a class of recurrent neural networks with guaranteed properties

This paper proposes a physics-informed learning framework for a class of recurrent neural networks tailored to large-scale and networked systems. The approach aims to learn control-oriented models that preserve the structural and stability properties of the plant. The learning algorithm is formulated as a convex optimisation problem, allowing the inclusion of linear matrix inequality constraints to enforce desired system features. Furthermore, when the plant exhibits structural modularity, the resulting optimisation problem can be parallelised, requiring communication only among neighbouring subsystems. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
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All authors Daniele Ravasio, Claudia Sbardi, Marcello Farina, Andrea Ballarino

Image and Video Processing

A Mamba-based Perceptual Loss Function for Learning-based UGC Transcoding

In user-generated content (UGC) transcoding, source videos typically suffer various degradations due to prior compression, editing, or suboptimal capture conditions. Consequently, existing video compression paradigms that solely optimize for fidelity relative to the reference become suboptimal, as they force the codec to replicate the inherent artifacts of the non-pristine source. To address this, we propose a novel perceptually inspired loss function for learning-based UGC video transcoding that redefines the role of the reference video, shifting it from a ground-truth pixel anchor to an informative contextual guide. Specifically, we train a lightweight neural quality model based on a Selective Structured State-Space Model (Mamba) optimized using a weakly-supervised Siamese ranking strategy. The proposed model is then integrated into the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) process of two neural video codecs (DCVC and HiNeRV) as a loss function, aiming to generate reconstructed content with improved perceptual quality. Our experiments demonstrate that this framework achieves substantial coding gains over both autoencoder and implicit neural representation-based baselines, with 8.46% and 12.89% BD-rate savings, respectively.
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All authors Zihao Qi, Chen Feng, Fan Zhang, Xiaozhong Xu, Shan Liu, David Bull

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Rotatable Antenna-Empowered Wireless Networks: A Tutorial

Non-fixed flexible antenna architectures, such as fluid antenna system (FAS), movable antenna (MA), and pinching antenna, have garnered significant interest in recent years. Among them, rotatable antenna (RA) has emerged as a promising technology for enhancing wireless communication and sensing performance through flexible antenna orientation/boresight rotation. By enabling mechanical or electronic boresight adjustment without altering physical antenna positions, RA introduces additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) beyond conventional beamforming. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive tutorial on the fundamentals, architectures, and applications of RA-empowered wireless networks. Specifically, we begin by reviewing the historical evolution of RA-related technologies and clarifying the distinctive role of RA among flexible antenna architectures. Then, we establish a unified mathematical framework for RA-enabled systems, including general antenna/array rotation models, as well as channel models that cover near- and far-field propagation characteristics, wideband frequency selectivity, and polarization effects. Building upon this foundation, we investigate antenna/array rotation optimization in representative communication and sensing scenarios. Furthermore, we examine RA channel estimation/acquisition strategies encompassing orientation scheduling mechanisms and signal processing methods that exploit multi-view channel observations. Beyond theoretical modeling and algorithmic design, we discuss practical RA configurations and deployment strategies. We also present recent RA prototypes and experimental results that validate the practical performance gains enabled by antenna rotation. Finally, we highlight promising extensions of RA to emerging wireless paradigms and outline open challenges to inspire future research.
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All authors Beixiong Zheng, Qingjie Wu, Xue Xiong, Yanhua Tan, Tiantian Ma, Qi Dai, Weihua Zhu, Changsheng You, Xiaodan Shao, Lipeng Zhu, Jie Tang, Robert Schober, Kai-Kit Wong, Rui Zhang

Signal Processing

Multi-User Covert Communication in Spatially Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

This paper investigates an uplink multi-user covert communication system with spatially distributed users. Unlike prior works that approximate channel statistics using averaged parameters and homogeneous assumptions, this study explicitly models each user's geometric position and corresponding user-to-Willie and user-to-Bob channel variances. This approach enables an accurate characterization of spatially heterogeneous covert environments. We mathematically prove that a generalized on-off power control scheme, which jointly accounts for both Bob's and Willie's channels, constitutes the optimal transmission strategy in heterogeneous user configurations. Leveraging the optimal strategy, we derive closed-form expressions for the minimum detection error probability and the minimum number of cooperative users required to satisfy a covert constraint. With the closed-form expressions, comprehensive theoretical analyses are conducted, which are validated by Monte-Carlo simulations. One important insight obtained from the analysis is that user spatial heterogeneity can enhance covert communication performance. Building on these findings, a piecewise search algorithm is proposed to achieve exact optimality with significantly reduced computational complexity. We demonstrate that optimization considering user's spatial heterogeneity achieves substantially improved covert communication performance than that based on the assumption of spatial homogeneity.
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Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Challenges in Hyperspectral Imaging for Autonomous Driving: The HSI-Drive Case

The use of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) in autonomous driving (AD), while promising, faces many challenges related to the specifics and requirements of this application domain. On the one hand, non-controlled and variable lighting conditions, the wide depth-of-field ranges, and dynamic scenes with fast-moving objects. On the other hand, the requirements for real-time operation and the limited computational resources of embedded platforms. The combination of these factors determines both the criteria for selecting appropriate HSI technologies and the development of custom vision algorithms that leverage the spectral and spatial information obtained from the sensors. In this article, we analyse several techniques explored in the research of HSI-based vision systems with application to AD, using as an example results obtained from experiments using data from the most recent version of the HSI-Drive dataset.
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Image and Video Processing

Language-Free Generative Editing from One Visual Example

Text-guided diffusion models have advanced image editing by enabling intuitive control through language. However, despite their strong capabilities, we surprisingly find that SOTA methods struggle with simple, everyday transformations such as rain or blur. We attribute this limitation to weak and inconsistent textual supervision during training, which leads to poor alignment between language and vision. Existing solutions often rely on extra finetuning or stronger text conditioning, but suffer from high data and computational requirements. We argue that diffusion-based editing capabilities aren't lost but merely hidden from text. The door to cost-efficient visual editing remains open, and the key lies in a vision-centric paradigm that perceives and reasons about visual change as humans do, beyond words. Inspired by this, we introduce Visual Diffusion Conditioning (VDC), a training-free framework that learns conditioning signals directly from visual examples for precise, language-free image editing. Given a paired example -one image with and one without the target effect- VDC derives a visual condition that captures the transformation and steers generation through a novel condition-steering mechanism. An accompanying inversion-correction step mitigates reconstruction errors during DDIM inversion, preserving fine detail and realism. Across diverse tasks, VDC outperforms both training-free and fully fine-tuned text-based editing methods. The code and models are open-sourced at https://omaralezaby.github.io/vdc/
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All authors Omar Elezabi, Eduard Zamfir, Zongwei Wu, Radu Timofte

Systems and Control

Four-Transistor Four-Diode (4T4D) Series/Parallel Chopper Module for Auto-Balancing STATCOM and Low Control and Development Complexity

Static synchronous compensators (STATCOMs) manage reactive power compensation in modern power grids and have become essential for the integration of renewable energy sources such as wind farms. Cascaded H bridges have become the preferred topology for high-power STATCOMs, but balancing module capacitor voltages remains a persistent challenge. Conventional solutions equip every module with a voltage sensor – a component that is costly, temperature-sensitive, and prone to aging-related failures. Recent parallel-capable module topologies can balance voltage through switched-capacitor operation. The latest developments reduced the sensor requirement from one per module to one per arm. However, these implementations require twice as many individual transistors compared to series-only topologies. We present a STATCOM solution based on the four-transistor four-diode (4T4D) series\,/\,parallel chopper cell. This topology achieves bidirectional parallelization with only four transistors per module – exactly as many as a conventional full bridge. Furthermore, we propose a dual-loop control strategy that fully eliminates module voltage sensors by inferring voltage levels from the modulation index. This scheme also improves output quality by regulating the modulation depth. We validated our proposal through simulation and experiments. We built a prototype to interface the grid. The prototype further passed robustness tests with step change, current direction reversal, and grid disturbance. This work demonstrates the first modular STATCOM implementation that combines minimum transistor count with complete elimination of module voltage sensors.
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All authors Jinshui Zhang, Zane Mannings, Chris Dittmer, Angel V Peterchev, Stefan M Goetz

Image and Video Processing

Underdetermined Blind Source Separation via Weighted Simplex Shrinkage Regularization and Quantum Deep Image Prior

As most optical satellites remotely acquire multispectral images (MSIs) with limited spatial resolution, multispectral unmixing (MU) becomes a critical signal processing technology for analyzing the pure material spectra for high-precision classification and identification. Unlike the widely investigated hyperspectral unmixing (HU) problem, MU is much more challenging as it corresponds to the underdetermined blind source separation (BSS) problem, where the number of sources is larger than the number of available multispectral bands. In this article, we transform MU into its overdetermined counterpart (i.e., HU) by inventing a radically new quantum deep image prior (QDIP), which relies on the virtual band-splitting task conducted on the observed MSI for generating the virtual hyperspectral image (HSI). Then, we perform HU on the virtual HSI to obtain the virtual hyperspectral sources. Though HU is overdetermined, it still suffers from the ill-posed issue, for which we employ the convex geometry structure of the HSI pixels to customize a weighted simplex shrinkage (WSS) regularizer to mitigate the ill-posedness. Finally, the virtual hyperspectral sources are spectrally downsampled to obtain the desired multispectral sources. The proposed geometry/quantum-empowered MU (GQ-$\mu$) algorithm can also effectively obtain the spatial abundance distribution map for each source, where the geometric WSS regularization is adaptively and automatically controlled based on the sparsity pattern of the abundance tensor. Simulation and real-world data experiments demonstrate the practicality of our unsupervised GQ-$\mu$ algorithm for the challenging MU task. Ablation study demonstrates the strength of QDIP, not achieved by classical DIP, and validates the mechanics-inspired WSS geometry regularizer.
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Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from cs.CV

Image Rotation Angle Estimation: Comparing Circular-Aware Methods

Automatic image rotation estimation is a key preprocessing step in many vision pipelines. This task is challenging because angles have circular topology, creating boundary discontinuities that hinder standard regression methods. We present a comprehensive study of five circular-aware methods for global orientation estimation: direct angle regression with circular loss, classification via angular binning, unit-vector regression, phase-shifting coder, and circular Gaussian distribution. Using transfer learning from ImageNet-pretrained models, we systematically evaluate these methods across sixteen modern architectures by adapting their output heads for rotation-specific predictions. Our results show that probabilistic methods, particularly the circular Gaussian distribution, are the most robust across architectures, while classification achieves the best accuracy on well-matched backbones but suffers training instabilities on others. The best configuration (classification with EfficientViT-B3) achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.23{\deg} (mean across five independent runs) on the DRC-D dataset, while the circular Gaussian distribution with MambaOut Base achieves a virtually identical 1.24{\deg} with greater robustness across backbones. Training and evaluating our top-performing method-architecture combinations on COCO 2014, the best configuration reaches 3.71{\deg} MAE, improving substantially over prior work, with further improvement to 2.84{\deg} on the larger COCO 2017 dataset.
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Systems and Control

DRL-Based Spectrum Sharing for RIS-Aided Local High-Quality Wireless Networks

This paper investigates a smart spectrum-sharing framework for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided local high-quality wireless networks (LHQWNs) within a mobile network operator (MNO) ecosystem. Although RISs are often considered harmful due to interference, this work shows that properly controlled RISs can enhance quality of service (QoS). The proposed system enables temporary spectrum access for multiple vertical service providers (VSPs) by dynamically allocating radio resources. The spectrum is divided into dedicated subchannels assigned to individual VSPs and reusable subchannels shared among multiple VSPs, while RIS improves propagation conditions and zero-forcing (ZF) precoding is adopted at the multiantenna base station (BS) to cancel inter-user interference. We formulate a multi-VSP utility maximization problem that jointly optimizes subchannel assignment, transmit power, and RIS phase configuration while accounting for spectrum access costs, RIS leasing costs, and QoS constraints. The resulting mixed-integer non-linear program (MINLP) is modeled as a Markov decision process (MDP) and solved using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) and soft actor-critic (SAC) algorithms are developed and compared. Numerical results show that SAC generally outperforms DDPG in convergence, stability, and utility, particularly in larger-scale scenarios. In the reduced-scale ablation study, both joint DRL methods outperform the heuristic benchmark by at least 6.6% in final moving-average reward.
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All authors Hamid Reza Hashempour, Mina Khadem, Eduard A. Jorswieck, Hien Quoc Ngo

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from physics.flu-dyn

Real-time control of multiphase processes with learned operators

Multiphase flows frequently occur naturally and in manufactured devices. Controlling such phenomena is extremely challenging due to the strongly non-linear dynamics, rapid phase transitions, and the limited spatial and temporal resolution of available sensors, which can lead to significant inaccuracies in predicting and managing these flows. In most cases, numerical models are the only way to access high spatial and temporal resolution data to an extent that allows for fine control. While embedding numerical models in control algorithms could enable fine control of multiphase processes, the significant computational burden currently limits their practical application. This work proposes a surrogate-assisted model predictive control (MPC) framework for regulating multiphase processes using learned operators. A Fourier Neural Operator (FNO) is trained to forecast the spatiotemporal evolution of a phase-indicator field (the volume fraction) over a finite horizon from a short history of recent states and a candidate actuation signal. The neural operator surrogate is then iteratively called during the optimisation process to identify the optimal control variable. To illustrate the approach, we solve an optimal control problem (OCP) on a two-phase Eulerian bubble column. Here, the controller tracks piecewise-constant liquid level setpoints by adjusting the gas flow rate introduced into the system. The results we obtained indicate that field-level forecasting with FNOs are well suited for closed-loop optimization since they have relatively low evaluation cost. The latter provide a practical route toward MPC for fast multiphase unit operations and a foundation for future extensions to partial observability and physics-informed operator learning.
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Signal Processing

Joint Training Scattering Matrix Learning and Channel Estimation for Beyond-Diagonal Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Beyond-diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) generalizes the conventional diagonal RIS (D-RIS) by introducing tunable inter-element connections, offering enhanced wave manipulation capabilities. However, realizing the advantages of BD-RIS requires accurate channel state information (CSI), whose acquisition becomes significantly more challenging due to the increased number of channel coefficients, leading to prohibitively large pilot training overhead in BD-RIS-aided multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. Existing studies reduce pilot overhead by exploiting the channel correlations induced by the Kronecker-product or multi-linear structure of BD-RIS-aided channels, which neglect the spatial correlation among antennas and the statistical correlation across RIS-user channels. In this paper, we propose a learning-based channel estimation framework, namely the joint training scattering matrix learning and channel estimation framework (JTSMLCEF), which jointly optimizes the BD-RIS training scattering matrix and estimates the cascaded channels in an end-to-end manner to achieve accurate channel estimation and reduce the pilot overhead. The proposed JTSMLCEF follows a two-phase channel estimation protocol to enable adaptive training scattering matrix optimization with a training scattering matrix optimizer (TSMO) and cascaded channel estimation with a dual-attention channel estimator (DACE). Specifically, the DACE is designed with intra-user and inter-user attention modules to capture the multi-dimensional correlations in multi-user cascaded channels. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of JTSMLCEF. Compared with the current state-of-the-art method, it reduces the pilot overhead by $80\%$ while further reducing the normalized mean squared error (NMSE) by $82.6\%$ and $92.5\%$ in indoor and urban micro-cell (UMi) scenarios, respectively.
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All authors Yiyang Peng, Binggui Zhou, Yutong Zheng, Danilo Mandic, Bruno Clerckx

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

CSI-tuples-based 3D Channel Fingerprints Construction Assisted by MultiModal Learning

Low-altitude communications can promote the integration of aerial and terrestrial wireless resources, expand network coverage, and enhance transmission quality, thereby empowering the development of sixth-generation (6G) mobile communications. As an enabler for low-altitude transmission, 3D channel fingerprints (3D-CF), also referred to as the 3D radio map or 3D channel knowledge map, are expected to enhance the understanding of communication environments and assist in the acquisition of channel state information (CSI), thereby avoiding repeated estimations and reducing computational complexity. In this paper, we propose a modularized multimodal framework to construct 3D-CF. Specifically, we first establish the 3D-CF model as a collection of CSI-tuples based on Rician fading channels, with each tuple comprising the low-altitude vehicle's (LAV) positions and its corresponding statistical CSI. In consideration of the heterogeneous structures of different prior data, we formulate the 3D-CF construction problem as a multimodal regression task, where the target channel information in the CSI-tuple can be estimated directly by its corresponding LAV positions, together with communication measurements and geographic environment maps. Then, a high-efficiency multimodal framework is proposed accordingly, which includes a correlation-based multimodal fusion (Corr-MMF) module, a multimodal representation (MMR) module, and a CSI regression (CSI-R) module. Numerical results show that our proposed framework can efficiently construct 3D-CF and achieve at least 27.5% higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art algorithms under different communication scenarios, demonstrating its competitive performance and excellent generalization ability. We also analyze the computational complexity and illustrate its superiority in terms of the inference time.
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All authors Chenjie Xie, Li You, Ruirong Chen, Gaoning He, Xiqi Gao

Systems and Control

Entire Period Transient Stability of Synchronous Generators Considering LVRT Switching of Nearby Renewable Energy Sources

In scenarios where synchronous generators (SGs) and grid-following renewable energy sources (GFLR) are co-located, existing research, which mainly focuses on the first-swing stability of SGs, often overlooks ongoing dynamic interactions between GFLRs and SGs throughout the entire rotor swing period. To address this gap, this study first reveals that the angle oscillations of SG can cause periodic grid voltage fluctuations, potentially triggering low-voltage ride-through (LVRT) control switching of GFLR repeatedly. Then, the periodic energy changes of SGs under "circular" and "rectangular" LVRT limits are analyzed. The results indicate that circular limits are detrimental to SG's first-swing stability, while rectangular limits and their slow recovery strategies can lead to SG's multi-swing instability. Conservative stability criteria are also proposed for these phenomena. Furthermore, an additional controller based on feedback linearization is introduced to enhance the entire period transient stability of SG by adjusting the post-fault GFLR output current. Finally, the efficacy of the analysis is validated through electromagnetic transient simulations and controller hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) tests.
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All authors Bingfang Li, Songhao Yang, Guosong Wang, Yiwen Hu, Xu Zhang, Zhiguo Hao, Dongxu Chang, Baohui Zhang

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.DS

Global Stability Analysis of the Age-Structured Chemostat With Substrate Dynamics

In this paper we study the stability properties of the equilibrium point for an age-structured chemostat model with renewal boundary condition and coupled substrate dynamics under constant dilution rate. This is a complex infinite-dimensional feedback system. It has two feedback loops, both nonlinear. A positive static loop due to reproduction at the age-zero boundary of the PDE, counteracted and dominated by a negative dynamic loop with the substrate dynamics. The derivation of explicit sufficient conditions that guarantee global stability estimates is carried out by using an appropriate Lyapunov functional. The constructed Lyapunov functional guarantees global exponential decay estimates and uniform global asymptotic stability with respect to a measure related to the Lyapunov functional. From a biological perspective, stability arises because reproduction is constrained by substrate availability, while dilution, mortality, and substrate depletion suppress transient increases in biomass before age-structure effects can amplify them. The obtained results are applied to a chemostat model from the literature, where the derived stability condition is compared with existing results that are based on (necessarily local) linearization methods.
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Systems and Control

Feature Selection for Fault Prediction in Distribution Systems

While conventional power system protection isolates faulty components only after a fault has occurred, fault prediction approaches try to detect faults before they can cause significant damage. Although initial studies have demonstrated successful proofs of concept, development is hindered by scarce field data and ineffective feature selection. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a surrogate task that uses simulation data for feature selection. This task exhibits a strong correlation (r = 0.92) with real-world fault prediction performance. We generate a large dataset containing 20000 simulations with 34 event classes and diverse grid configurations. From 1556 candidate features, we identify 374 optimal features. A case study on three substations demonstrates the effectiveness of the selected features, achieving an F1-score of 0.80 and outperforming baseline approaches that use frequency-domain and wavelet-based features.
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All authors Georg Kordowich, Julian Oelhaf, Siming Bayer, Andreas Maier, Matthias Kereit, Johann Jaeger

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO

A Minimum-Energy Control Approach for Redundant Mobile Manipulators in Physical Human-Robot Interaction Applications

Research on mobile manipulation systems that physically interact with humans has expanded rapidly in recent years, opening the way to tasks which could not be performed using fixed-base manipulators. Within this context, developing suitable control methodologies is essential since mobile manipulators introduce additional degrees of freedom, making the design of control approaches more challenging and more prone to performance optimization. This paper proposes a control approach for a mobile manipulator, composed of a mobile base equipped with a robotic arm mounted on the top, with the objective of minimizing the overall kinetic energy stored in the whole-body mobile manipulator in physical human-robot interaction applications. The approach is experimentally tested with reference to a peg-in-hole task, and the results demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the overall kinetic energy stored in the whole-body robotic system and improves the system performance compared with the benchmark method.
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All authors Davide Tebaldi, Niccolò Paradisi, Fabio Pini, Luigi Biagiotti

Signal Processing

Rate-Splitting Multiple Access with a SIC-Free Receiver: An Experimental Study

Most Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) implementations rely on successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver, whose performance is inherently limited by error propagation during common-stream decoding. This paper addresses this issue by developing a SIC-free RSMA receiver based on joint demapping (JD), which directly evaluates bit vectors over a composite constellation. Using a two-user Multiple-Input Single-Output (MISO) prototype, we conduct over-the-air measurements to systematically compare SIC and JD-based receivers. The results show that the proposed SIC-free receiver provides stronger reliability and better practicality over a wider operating range, with all observations being consistent with theoretical expectations.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

A Wireless World Model for AI-Native 6G Networks

Integrating AI into the physical layer is a cornerstone of 6G networks. However, current data-driven approaches struggle to generalize across dynamic environments because they lack an intrinsic understanding of electromagnetic wave propagation. We introduce the Wireless World Model (WWM), a multi-modal foundation framework predicting the spatiotemporal evolution of wireless channels by internalizing the causal relationship between 3D geometry and signal dynamics. Pre-trained on a massive ray-traced multi-modal dataset, WWM overcomes the data authenticity gap, further validated under real-world measurement data. Using a joint-embedding predictive architecture with a multi-modal mixture-of-experts Transformer, WWM fuses channel state information, 3D point clouds, and user trajectories into a unified representation. Across the five key downstream tasks supported by WWM, it achieves remarkable performance in seen environments, unseen generalization scenarios, and real-world measurements, consistently outperforming SOTA uni-modal foundation models and task-specific models. This paves the way for physics-aware 6G intelligence that adapts to the physical world.
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All authors Ziqi Chen, Yi Ren, Yixuan Huang, Qi Sun, Nan Li, Yuhong Huang, Yifan Li, Liang Xia

Systems and Control

On Port-Hamiltonian Formulation of Hysteretic Energy Storage Elements: The Backlash Case

This paper presents a port-Hamiltonian formulation of backlash-driven hysteretic energy storage elements. First, we revisit the passivity property of backlash-driven storage elements by presenting a family of storage functions. We explicitly derive the corresponding available storage and required supply functions in the sense of Willems, and show the interlacing property of the aforementioned family of storage functions sandwiched between the available storage and required supply functions. Second, using the obtained family of storage functions, we present a port-Hamiltonian formulation of hysteretic inductors. In particular, we show how an appropriate Hamiltonian function is defined using the family of storage functions and how the hysteretic elements can be expressed as a port-Hamiltonian system with feedthrough term, where the feedthrough term represents energy dissipation. Correspondingly, we illustrate its applicability in describing an RC circuit (in parallel and in series) containing a backlash inductor.
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Systems and Control

Dominant Transient Stability of the Co-located PLL-Based Grid-Following Renewable Plant and Synchronous Condenser Systems

Deploying synchronous condensers (SynCons) near grid-following renewable energy sources (GFLRs) is an effective and increasingly adopted strategy for grid support. However, the potential transient instability risks in such configurations remain an open research question. This study investigates the mechanism of dominant synchronization instability source transition upon SynCon integration and proposes a straightforward approach to enhance system stability by leveraging their interactive characteristics. Firstly, a dual-timescale decoupling model is established, partitioning the system into a fast subsystem representing phase-locked loop (PLL) dynamics and a slow subsystem characterizing SynCon rotor dynamics. The study then examines the influence of SynCons on the transient stability of nearby PLLs and their own inherent stability. The study shows that SynCon's voltage-source characteristics and its time-scale separation from PLL dynamics can significantly enhance the PLL's stability boundary and mitigate non-coherent coupling effects among multiple GFLRs. However, the dominant instability source shifts from the fast-time-scale PLL to the slow-time-scale SynCon after SynCon integration. Crucially, this paper demonstrates that the damping effect of PLL control can also be transferred from the fast to the slow time scale, allowing well-tuned PLL damping to suppress SynCon rotor acceleration. Consequently, by utilizing SynCon's inherent support capability and a simple PLL damping loop, the transient stability of the co-located system can be significantly enhanced. These conclusions are validated using a converter controller-based Hardware-in-the-Loop (CHIL) platform.
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All authors Bingfang Li, Songhao Yang, Qinglan Wang, Xu Zhang, Huan Xie, Chuan Qin, Zhiguo Hao

Systems and Control

Multi-Swing Transient Stability of Synchronous Generators and IBR Combined Generation Systems

In traditional views, the build-up of accelerating energy during faults can cause the well-known first-swing angle instability in synchronous generators (SGs). Interestingly, this letter presents a new insight that the accumulation of decelerating energy due to the low voltage ride-through (LVRT) and recovery control of grid-following inverter-based resources (GFL-IBRs), might also result in transient angle instability in SGs. The transient energy accumulated during angle-decreasing swing transforms into the acceleration energy of the subsequent swing, hence such phenomena often manifest as multi-swing instability. Both theoretical analysis and simulation support these findings.
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All authors Songhao Yang, Bingfang Li, Zhiguo Hao, Yiwen Hu, Huan Xie, Tianqi Zhao, Baohui Zhang