Peer Revenue Impact factor: volatile

Papers

Fresh from arXiv, typeset properly. Highlighted words trade on the market.

Electrical Engineering and Systems Science

eess Watch Electrical Engineering and Systems Science (sign in to use)

Monday 6 April

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

Generalizable Audio-Visual Navigation via Binaural Difference Attention and Action Transition Prediction

In Audio-Visual Navigation (AVN), agents must locate sound sources in unseen 3D environments using visual and auditory cues. However, existing methods often struggle with generalization in unseen scenarios, as they tend to overfit to semantic sound features and specific training environments. To address these challenges, we propose the Binaural Difference Attention with Action Transition Prediction (BDATP) framework, which jointly optimizes perception and policy. Specifically, the Binaural Difference Attention (BDA) module explicitly models interaural differences to enhance spatial orientation, reducing reliance on semantic categories. Simultaneously, the Action Transition Prediction (ATP) task introduces an auxiliary action prediction objective as a regularization term, mitigating environment-specific overfitting. Extensive experiments on the Replica and Matterport3D datasets demonstrate that BDATP can be seamlessly integrated into various mainstream baselines, yielding consistent and significant performance gains. Notably, our framework achieves state-of-the-art Success Rates across most settings, with a remarkable absolute improvement of up to 21.6 percentage points in Replica dataset for unheard sounds. These results underscore BDATP's superior generalization capability and its robustness across diverse navigation architectures.
Read the full abstract

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Stratifying Reinforcement Learning with Signal Temporal Logic

In this paper, we develop a stratification-based semantics for Signal Temporal Logic (STL) in which each atomic predicate is interpreted as a membership test in a stratified space. This perspective reveals a novel correspondence principle between stratification theory and STL, showing that most STL formulas can be viewed as inducing a stratification of space-time. The significance of this interpretation is twofold. First, it offers a fresh theoretical framework for analyzing the structure of the embedding space generated by deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and relates it to the geometry of the ambient decision space. Second, it provides a principled framework that both enables the reuse of existing high-dimensional analysis tools and motivates the creation of novel computational techniques. To ground the theory, we (1) illustrate the role of stratification theory in Minigrid games and (2) apply numerical techniques to the latent embeddings of a DRL agent playing such a game where the robustness of STL formulas is used as the reward. In the process, we propose computationally efficient signatures that, based on preliminary evidence, appear promising for uncovering the stratification structure of such embedding spaces.
Read the full abstract

Audio and Speech Processing

Full-Duplex-Bench-v3: Benchmarking Tool Use for Full-Duplex Voice Agents Under Real-World Disfluency

We introduce Full-Duplex-Bench-v3 (FDB-v3), a benchmark for evaluating spoken language models under naturalistic speech conditions and multi-step tool use. Unlike prior work, our dataset consists entirely of real human audio annotated for five disfluency categories, paired with scenarios requiring chained API calls across four task domains. We evaluate six model configurations – GPT-Realtime, Gemini Live 2.5, Gemini Live 3.1, Grok, Ultravox v0.7, and a traditional Cascaded pipeline (Whisper$\rightarrow$GPT-4o$\rightarrow$TTS) – across accuracy, latency, and turn-taking dimensions. GPT-Realtime leads on Pass@1 (0.600) and interruption avoidance (13.5%); Gemini Live 3.1 achieves the fastest latency (4.25~s) but the lowest turn-take rate (78.0%); and the Cascaded baseline, despite a perfect turn-take rate, incurs the highest latency (10.12~s). Across all systems, self-correction handling and multi-step reasoning under hard scenarios remain the most consistent failure modes.
Read the full abstract

All authors Guan-Ting Lin, Chen Chen, Zhehuai Chen, Hung-yi Lee

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

Joint Fullband-Subband Modeling for High-Resolution SingFake Detection

Rapid advances in singing voice synthesis have increased unauthorized imitation risks, creating an urgent need for better Singing Voice Deepfake (SingFake) Detection, also known as SVDD. Unlike speech, singing contains complex pitch, wide dynamic range, and timbral variations. Conventional 16 kHz-sampled detectors prove inadequate, as they discard vital high-frequency information. This study presents the first systematic analysis of high-resolution (44.1 kHz sampling rate) audio for SVDD. We propose a joint fullband-subband modeling framework: the fullband captures global context, while subband-specific experts isolate fine-grained synthesis artifacts unevenly distributed across the spectrum. Experiments on the WildSVDD dataset demonstrate that high-frequency subbands provide essential complementary cues. Our framework significantly outperforms 16 kHz-sampled models, proving that high-resolution audio and strategic subband integration are critical for robust in-the-wild detection.
Read the full abstract

All authors Xuanjun Chen, Chia-Yu Hu, Sung-Feng Huang, Haibin Wu, Hung-yi Lee, Jyh-Shing Roger Jang

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

E-VLA: Event-Augmented Vision-Language-Action Model for Dark and Blurred Scenes

Robotic Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models generalize well for open-ended manipulation, but their perception is fragile under sensing-stage degradations such as extreme low light, motion blur, and black clipping. We present E-VLA, an event-augmented VLA framework that improves manipulation robustness when conventional frame-based vision becomes unreliable. Instead of reconstructing images from events, E-VLA directly leverages motion and structural cues in event streams to preserve semantic perception and perception-action consistency under adverse conditions. We build an open-source teleoperation platform with a DAVIS346 event camera and collect a real-world synchronized RGB-event-action manipulation dataset across diverse tasks and illuminations. We also propose lightweight, pretrained-compatible event integration strategies and study event windowing for stable deployment. Experiments show that even a simple parameter-free fusion, i.e., overlaying accumulated event maps onto RGB images, could substantially improve robustness in dark and heavy-blur scenes: on Pick-Place at 20 lux, success increases from 0% (image-only) to 60% with overlay fusion and to 90% with our event adapter; under severe motion blur (1000 ms-exposure proxy), Pick-Place improves from 0% to 20-25%, and Sorting from 5% to 32.5%. Overall, E-VLA provides systematic evidence that event-driven perception can be effectively integrated into VLA models, pointing toward robust embodied intelligence beyond conventional frame-based imaging. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/JJayzee/E-VLA.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jiajun Zhai, Hao Shi, Shangwei Guo, Kailun Yang, Kaiwei Wang

Systems and Control

Bridging Data-Driven Reachability Analysis and Statistical Estimation via Constrained Matrix Convex Generators

Data-driven reachability analysis enables safety verification when first-principles models are unavailable. This requires constructing sets of system models consistent with measured trajectories and noise assumptions. Existing approaches rely on zonotopic or box-based approximations, which do not fit the geometry of common noise distributions such as Gaussian disturbances and can lead to significant conservatism, especially in high-dimensional settings. This paper builds on ellipsotope-based representations to introduce mixed-norm uncertainty sets for data-driven reachability. The highest-density region defines the exact minimum-volume noise confidence set, while Constrained Convex Generators (CCG) and their matrix counterpart (CMCG) provide compatible geometric representations at the noise and parameter level. We show that the resulting CMCG coincides with the maximum-likelihood confidence ellipsoid for Gaussian disturbances, while remaining strictly tighter than constrained matrix zonotopes for mixed bounded-Gaussian noise. For non-convex noise distributions such as Gaussian mixtures, a minimum-volume enclosing ellipsoid provides a tractable convex surrogate. We further prove containment of the CMCG times CCG product and bound the conservatism of the Gaussian-Gaussian interaction. Numerical examples demonstrate substantially tighter reachable sets compared to box-based approximations of Gaussian disturbances. These results enable less conservative safety verification and improve the accuracy of uncertainty-aware control design.
Read the full abstract

All authors Peng Xie, Zhen Zhang, Rolf Findeisen, Amr Alanwar

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

Partially deterministic sampling for compressed sensing with denoising guarantees

We study compressed sensing when the sampling vectors are chosen from the rows of a unitary matrix. In the literature, these sampling vectors are typically chosen randomly; the use of randomness has enabled major empirical and theoretical advances in the field. However, in practice there are often certain crucial sampling vectors, in which case practitioners will depart from the theory and sample such rows deterministically. In this work, we derive an optimized sampling scheme for Bernoulli selectors which naturally combines random and deterministic selection of rows, thus rigorously deciding which rows should be sampled deterministically. This sampling scheme provides measurable improvements in image compressed sensing for both generative and sparse priors when compared to with-replacement and without-replacement sampling schemes, as we show with theoretical results and numerical experiments. Additionally, our theoretical guarantees feature improved sample complexity bounds compared to previous works, and novel denoising guarantees in this setting.
Read the full abstract

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Feasibility-Aware Imitation Learning for Benders Decomposition

Mixed-integer optimization problems arise in a wide range of control applications. Benders decomposition is a widely used algorithm for solving such problems by decomposing them into a mixed-integer master problem and a continuous subproblem. A key computational bottleneck is the repeated solution of increasingly complex master problems across iterations. In this paper, we propose a feasibility-aware imitation learning framework that predicts the values of the integer variables of the master problem at each iteration while accounting for feasibility with respect to constraints governing admissible integer assignments and the accumulated Benders feasibility cuts. The agent is trained using a two-stage procedure that combines behavioral cloning with a feasibility-based logit adjustment to bias predictions toward assignments that satisfy the evolving cut set. The agent is deployed within an agent-based Benders decomposition framework that combines explicit feasibility checks with a time-limited solver computation of a valid lower bound. The proposed approach retains finite convergence properties, as the lower bound is certified at each iteration. Application to a prototypical case study shows that the proposed method improves solution time relative to existing imitation learning approaches for accelerating Benders decomposition, while preserving solution accuracy.
Read the full abstract

All authors Bernard T. Agyeman, Zhe Li, Ilias Mitrai, Prodromos Daoutidis

Signal Processing

Multi-Scaled Unscented Kalman Filter

The unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is a commonly used algorithm capable of estimating the states of nonlinear dynamic systems. It carefully chooses a set of sample points, called sigma points that capture the nonlinear system states posterior mean and covariance. The filter is based on the scaled unscented transform, where the scaling parameters impact the spreading of the sigma points, determining the estimated model capturing. In its current form, the UKF employs a single set of scaling parameters shared by all sigma points. Because states in multi-dimensional models often exhibit substantially different behaviors, this imposes a critical limitation: the standard UKF parameters cannot be tuned to extend the spread for one dimension while reducing it for another. To bridge this gap, we propose the multi-scaled UKF to enable spreading differently per state, while maintaining the key properties of the sigma points and UKF. A rigorous mathematical foundation is provided, introducing a novel theoretical approach to multi-scaling. The benefits of this approach are demonstrated through two distinct nonlinear dynamic systems. Consequently, our multi-scaled UKF captures the nonlinear behavior of multi-dimensional states more effectively, leading to improved estimation accuracy.
Read the full abstract

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Collaborative Altruistic Safety in Coupled Multi-Agent Systems

This paper presents a novel framework for ensuring safety in dynamically coupled multi-agent systems through collaborative control. Drawing inspiration from ecological models of altruism, we develop collaborative control barrier functions that allow agents to cooperatively enforce individual safety constraints under coupling dynamics. We introduce an altruistic safety condition based on the so-called Hamilton's rule, enabling agents to trade off their own safety to support higher-priority neighbors. By incorporating these conditions into a distributed optimization framework, we demonstrate increased feasibility and robustness in maintaining system-wide safety. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is illustrated through simulation in a simplified formation control scenario.
Read the full abstract

All authors Brooks A. Butler, Xiao Tan, Aaron D. Ames, Magnus Egerstedt

Systems and Control

Data-Driven Reachability Analysis with Optimal Input Design

This paper addresses the conservatism in data-driven reachability analysis for discrete-time linear systems subject to bounded process noise, where the system matrices are unknown and only input–state trajectory data are available. Building on the constrained matrix zonotope (CMZ) framework, two complementary strategies are proposed to reduce conservatism in reachable-set over-approximations. First, the standard Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse is replaced with a row-norm-minimizing right inverse computed via a second-order cone program (SOCP), which directly reduces the size of the resulting model set, yielding tighter generators and less conservative reachable sets. Second, an online A-optimal input design strategy is introduced to improve the informativeness of the collected data and the conditioning of the resulting model set, thereby reducing uncertainty. The proposed framework extends naturally to piecewise affine systems through mode-dependent data partitioning. Numerical results on a five-dimensional stable LTI system and a two-dimensional piecewise affine system demonstrate that combining designed inputs with the row-norm right inverse significantly reduces conservatism compared to a baseline using random inputs and the pseudoinverse, leading to tighter reachable sets for safety verification.
Read the full abstract

All authors Peng Xie, Davide M. Raimondo, Rolf Findeisen, Amr Alanwar

Systems and Control

Toward Self-Organizing Production Logistics: A Multi-Agent Approach

Production logistics is increasingly exposed to variability, dynamic interdependencies, and operational disturbances that challenge conventional centralized planning and control approaches. Following a Design Science Research Methodology, this paper establishes a conceptual foundation for the design, implementation, and evaluation of Self-Organizing Production Logistics (SOPL) systems. First, key technological and systemic drivers motivating SOPL are identified, including autonomous logistics resources, advances in distributed AI-based decision-making, and the transition toward circular production systems, which further amplify operational uncertainty and complexity. Based on these drivers, system-level objectives and design requirements for SOPL are derived. Building on these requirements, the paper proposes an initial multi-agent architecture that integrates embodied and non-embodied agents, event-driven coordination, semantic knowledge structures, and digital twins. In addition, a three-phase demonstration roadmap is presented, progressing from an initial laboratory demonstrator toward increasingly distributed and adaptive SOPL systems. The Phase I demonstrator provides an experimental environment for investigating disturbance handling, human involvement, and supervisory coordination within an order-driven kitting and supply scenario.
Read the full abstract

All authors Jan-Felix Klein, Yongkuk Jeong, Erik Flores-García, Magnus Wiktorsson

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.CL

Hallucination Basins: A Dynamic Framework for Understanding and Controlling LLM Hallucinations

Large language models (LLMs) hallucinate: they produce fluent outputs that are factually incorrect. We present a geometric dynamical systems framework in which hallucinations arise from task-dependent basin structure in latent space. Using autoregressive hidden-state trajectories across multiple open-source models and benchmarks, we find that separability is strongly task-dependent rather than universal: factoid settings can show clearer basin separation, whereas summarization and misconception-heavy settings are typically less stable and often overlap. We formalize this behavior with task-complexity and multi-basin theorems, characterize basin emergence in L-layer transformers, and show that geometry-aware steering can reduce hallucination probability without retraining.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

ACHEM: A Real-Time Digital Twin Framework with Channel and Radio Emulation

Digital twins are becoming an important tool for designing, developing, testing, and optimizing next-generation wireless communication systems. Over the past decade, system softwarization has become a reality, and wireless communication systems are no exception. Software-Defined Radios (SDRs), in general, and Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs), in particular, are often used for prototyping and testing advanced wireless systems. Unfortunately, there is currently no end-to-end, software-based, general-purpose testing environment for SDR-based systems: developers often rely on benchtop setups or even small testbeds, but those are costly and cumbersome to build. At the other end of the spectrum, simulations often rely on simplified channel/radio models and typically do not execute full-stack production code, which can increase development effort and reduce fidelity. In this paper, we propose ACHEM (A Channel Emulator), the first software-based, end-to-end wireless channel emulation environment and toolset for communication systems based on SDRs, specifically USRPs. With the proposed emulator and toolkit, any USRP-based system can be fully emulated at the I/Q level in a pure digital environment without requiring specialized hardware (e.g., vehicles, USRPs, FPGAs, or GPUs). The proposed emulator supports multiple transmitters and receivers, MIMO communications, multiple frequencies, heterogeneous sampling rates, real-time node mobility through vehicle emulation, antenna radiation patterns, and various channel models. ACHEM facilitates wireless digital twin development and deployment. ACHEM is validated with several popular open-source USRP-based wireless communication applications, including GNU Radio, srsRAN 4G/5G, and OpenAirInterface.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

LEAN-3D: Low-latency Hierarchical Point Cloud Codec for Mobile 3D Streaming

We aim to make learned point cloud compression deployable for low-latency streaming on mobile systems. While learned point cloud compression has shown strong coding efficiency, practical deployment on mobile platforms remains challenging because neural inference and entropy coding still incur substantial runtime overhead. This issue is critical for immersive 3D communication, where dense geometry must be delivered under tight end-to-end (E2E) latency and compute constraints. In this paper, we present LEAN-3D, a compute-aware point cloud codec for low-latency streaming. LEAN-3D designs a lightweight learned occupancy model at the shallow levels of a sparse occupancy hierarchy, where structural uncertainty is highest, and develops a lightweight deterministic coding scheme for the deep hierarchy tailored to the near-unary regime. We implement the complete encoder/decoder pipeline and evaluate it on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano edge device and a desktop host. In addition, LEAN-3D addresses the decoding failures observed in cross-platform deployment of learned codecs. Such failures arise from numerical inconsistencies in lossless entropy decoding across heterogeneous platforms. Experiments show that LEAN-3D achieves 3-5x latency reduction across datasets, reduces total edge-side energy consumption by up to 5.1x, and delivers lower sustained E2E latency under bandwidth-limited streaming. These results bring learned point cloud compression closer to deployable mobile 3D streaming.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from stat.ML

A Muon-Accelerated Algorithm for Low Separation Rank Tensor Generalized Linear Models

Tensor-valued data arise naturally in multidimensional signal and imaging problems, such as biomedical imaging. When incorporated into generalized linear models (GLMs), naive vectorization can destroy their multi-way structure and lead to high-dimensional, ill-posed estimation. To address this challenge, Low Separation Rank (LSR) decompositions reduce model complexity by imposing low-rank multilinear structure on the coefficient tensor. A representative approach for estimating LSR-based tensor GLMs (LSR-TGLMs) is the Low Separation Rank Tensor Regression (LSRTR) algorithm, which adopts block coordinate descent and enforces orthogonality of the factor matrices through repeated QR-based projections. However, the repeated projection steps can be computationally demanding and slow convergence. Motivated by the need for scalable estimation and classification from such data, we propose LSRTR-M, which incorporates Muon (MomentUm Orthogonalized by Newton-Schulz) updates into the LSRTR framework. Specifically, LSRTR-M preserves the original block coordinate scheme while replacing the projection-based factor updates with Muon steps. Across synthetic linear, logistic, and Poisson LSR-TGLMs, LSRTR-M converges faster in both iteration count and wall-clock time, while achieving lower normalized estimation and prediction errors. On the Vessel MNIST 3D task, it further improves computational efficiency while maintaining competitive classification performance.
Read the full abstract

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.DS

Global Linearization of Parameterized Nonlinear Systems with Stable Equilibrium Point Using the Koopman Operator

The Koopman operator framework enables global analysis of nonlinear systems through its inherent linearity. This study aims to clarify spectral properties of the Koopman operators for nonlinear systems with control inputs. To this end, we treat the inputs as parameters throughout this paper. We then introduce the Koopman operator for a parameterized dynamical system with a globally exponentially stable equilibrium point and analyze how eigenfunctions of the operator depend on the parameter. As a main result, we obtain a global linearization, which enables one to transform the nonlinear system into a finite-dimensional linear system, and we show that it depends continuously on the parameter. Subsequently, for a control-affine system, we investigate a condition under which the transformation providing a global bilinearization does not depend on the parameter. This provides the condition under which the global bilinearization for the control-affine system is independent of the parameter.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Performance Analysis of STAR-RIS-Assisted NOMA Wireless Systems with Realistic Indoor Outdoor THz Channel Models

In this paper, a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS)-aided downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) Terahertz (THz) wireless system is proposed for indoor and outdoor transmissions. We consider a near-field communication scenario where an access-point (AP) is deployed near a STAR-RIS panel. For links from the STAR-RIS to users, $\alpha-\mu$ distribution is adopted for the indoor small-scale fading channels, whereas the outdoor channels are based on Gaussian mixture or mixture of gamma, which follows the recent practical measurement reports. To facilitate performance analysis, we derive exact expressions of a probability density function (PDF) and a cumulative distribution function (CDF) of a weighted sum of $\alpha-\mu$ variates. Approximate PDF and CDF expressions of a weighted sum of Gaussian mixture variates are derived as well. Based on these results, closed-form expressions of the outage probability and the ergodic capacity, together with their asymptotic formulas at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), are obtained. Moreover, we analyze the capacity of the THz system at the low SNR regime. Impacts of hardware impairments and STAR-RIS protocols (i.e., energy splitting and mode-switching) on the system performance are evaluated. All developed analytical results are validated and demonstrated via numerical simulations.
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Simultaneous Unicast and Multicast Transmissions in Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces-assisted HAPS Wireless Networks: Performance Analysis and Optimization

In this paper, we investigate high-altitude platform station (HAPS) wireless networks for simultaneous non-orthogonal unicast and multicast transmissions. Specifically, stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM)-based wave-domain beamforming is proposed to enable efficient HAPS-to-ground communications. Also, the system performance is investigated from an energy-efficiency (EE) perspective, which is a crucial for HAPS operations. For performance analysis, we derive approximate closed-form expressions for the outage probability over Rician fading channels. For EE optimization, we jointly optimize the transmit power and the SIM phase-shifts for the maximal EE. Two methods are proposed to solve this non-convex optimization problem. The first method develops an efficient alternating optimization (AO) framework based on golden-section search and projected gradient ascent (PGA) for transmit power and phase-shift optimization, respectively. The second method uses unsupervised deep neural network (DNN) that does not require labeling. Performance comparison between the two methods, as well as with other benchmarks schemes are examined. Additionally, the impacts of the number of SIM elements per layers, the number of SIM layers, the maximum transmit power on the EE performance are evaluated. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed systems.
Read the full abstract

Image and Video Processing

An AI Teaching Assistant for Motion Picture Engineering

The rapid rise of LLMs over the last few years has promoted growing experimentation with LLM-driven AI tutors. However, the details of implementation, as well as the benefit in a teaching environment, are still in the early days of exploration. This article addresses these issues in the context of implementation of an AI Teaching Assistant (AI-TA) using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Trinity College Dublin's Master's Motion Picture Engineering (MPE) course. We provide details of our implementation (including the prompt to the LLM, and code), and highlight how we designed and tuned our RAG pipeline to meet course needs. We describe our survey instrument and report on the impact of the AI-TA through a number of quantitative metrics. The scale of our experiment (43 students, 296 sessions, 1,889 queries over 7 weeks) was sufficient to have confidence in our findings. Unlike previous studies, we experimented with allowing the use of the AI-TA in open-book examinations. Statistical analysis across three exams showed no performance differences regardless of AI-TA access (p > 0.05), demonstrating that thoughtfully designed assessments can maintain academic validity. Student feedback revealed that the AI-TA was beneficial (mean = 4.22/5), while students had mixed feelings about preferring it over human tutoring (mean = 2.78/5).
Read the full abstract

Systems and Control

Compact Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface with Phase-Gradient Coded Beam Steering and Controlled Substrate Loss

This paper presents a 1-bit reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) fabricated using a three-layer structure. It employs a manual layer stackup incorporating an optimal air gap to reduce the effective dielectric losses while using a low-cost FR4 substrate. The new design of the unit cells of the proposed RIS is outlined, with each unit cell featuring a PIN-diode-based, compact, simplified biasing network that simplifies the control circuit while maintaining distinct $\boldsymbol{0^\circ/180^\circ \pm 20^\circ}$ phase states between ON/OFF conditions. The designed RIS is in the form of a $\boldsymbol{10\times10}$ array with a compact size of $\boldsymbol{2.9\lambda_g \times 2.9\lambda_g}$. Additionally, a phase-gradient coding scheme is presented and utilized that achieves measured beam steering up to $\boldsymbol{\pm30^\circ}$ in both anechoic and noisy environments. Controlled and driven by an Arduino-cum-digital interface, the proposed RIS exhibits measured reflected wave gain enhancement of about 9\,dB over an incident wave angular range of $\boldsymbol{\pm 30^\circ}$. Furthermore, the design is also experimentally validated by transmitting quadrature phase-shift keying-modulated symbols via the RIS-assisted wireless channel. The proposed RIS works for the range 3.38–3.67\,GHz (8.3%), and is suitable for deployment for the 5G n78 \mbox{band (3.5\,GHz).}
Read the full abstract

Signal Processing

Flexible Beamforming Design with Two-layer Rotatable Antenna: Synergizing Array and Antenna Rotations

Reconfigurable antenna technology, such as movable antennas (MAs) and rotatable antennas (RAs), has emerged as a promising solution to enhance wireless communication performance by exploiting new degrees of freedom (DoFs) in antenna reconfiguration. However, existing RA designs mostly consider array-wise or antenna-wise rotation only, limiting their potential in wide-range radiation pattern control. To overcome this, we propose a new two-layer RA architecture for downlink coverage improvement, which combines array-wise rotation for global orientation adjustment with per-antenna rotation for fine-grained radiation refinement. We then formulate an optimization problem to maximize the minimum beamforming gain over a target region by jointly optimizing the two-layer rotations and transmit beamforming. To solve this non-convex problem, an efficient block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm is proposed, which alternately optimizes one of the three variables in an iterative manner, with the other two being fixed. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed two-layer RA significantly improves the minimum beamforming gain over fixed antenna arrays and single-layer RAs.
Read the full abstract

All authors Weijia Wang, Changsheng You, Xiaodan Shao, Rui Zhang

Systems and Control

Stochastic Model Predictive Control with Online Risk Allocation and Feedback Gain Selection

Stochastic Model Predictive Control addresses uncertainties by incorporating chance constraints that provide probabilistic guarantees of constraint satisfaction. However, simultaneously optimizing over the risk allocation and the feedback policies leads to intractable nonconvex problems. This is due to (i) products of functions involving the feedback law and risk allocation in the deterministic counterpart of the chance constraints, and (ii) the presence of the nonconvex Gaussian quantile (probit) function. Existing methods rely on two-stage optimization, which is nonconvex. To address this, we derive disjunctive convex chance constraints and select the feedback law from a set of precomputed candidates. The inherited compositions of the probit function are replaced with power- and exponential-cone representable approximations. The main advantage is that the problem can be formulated as a mixed-integer conic optimization problem and efficiently solved with off-the-shelf software. Moreover, the proposed formulations apply to general chance constraints with products of exclusive disjunctive and Gaussian variables. The proposed approaches are validated with a path-planning application.
Read the full abstract

Systems and Control

Safe and Near-Optimal Gate Control: A Case Study from the Danish West Coast

Ringkoebing Fjord is an inland water basin on the Danish west coast separated from the North Sea by a set of gates used to control the amount of water entering and leaving the fjord. Currently, human operators decide when and how many gates to open or close for controlling the fjord's water level, with the goal to satisfy a range of conflicting safety and performance requirements such as keeping the water level in a target range, allowing maritime traffic, and enabling fish migration. Uppaal Stratego. We then use this digital twin along with forecasts of the sea level and the wind speed to learn a gate controller in an online fashion. We evaluate the learned controllers under different sea-level scenarios, representing normal tidal behavior, high waters, and low waters. Our evaluation demonstrates that, unlike a baseline controller, the learned controllers satisfy the safety requirements, while performing similarly regarding the other requirements.
Read the full abstract

All authors Martin Kristjansen, Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Marius Mikučionis, Christian Schilling

Systems and Control

Modelling and Analysis of Supply Chains using Product Time Petri Nets

Supply chains involve geographically distributed manufacturing and assembly sites that must be coordinated under strict timing and resource constraints. While many existing approaches rely on Colored Petri Nets to model material flows, this work focuses on the temporal feasibility of supply chain processes. We propose a modular modelling approach based on Product Time Petri Nets (PTPNs), where each subsystem is represented independently and the global behaviour emerges through synchronised transition labels. A key feature of the model is the explicit representation of the supply chain manager as a critical shared and mobile resource, whose availability directly impacts system feasibility. We analyse how timing constraints and managerial capacity influence the system behaviour, identifying configurations that lead to successful executions, timeouts, or timelocks induced by incompatible timing constraints. This approach enables systematic what-if analysis of supply chain coordination policies and demonstrates the relevance of PTPNs for modelling and analysing synchronised timed systems.
Read the full abstract

All authors Eric Lubat, Pierre-Emmanuel Hladik, Yoann Mateu, Rémi Sauvère

Signal Processing

Activity Recognition Using mm-Wave Radar and Deep Learning: Prayer Tracker Case Study

The issue of privacy has gained significant attention in recent times. Many real-world applications increasingly require the use of sensitive data, such as in surveillance or tracking and assistance systems. To address these concerns, we propose a framework based on mm-wave radar technology that not only meets privacy requirements but also provides the necessary capabilities for these systems, including reliable current position tracking, sequence tracking, and feedback to the user. While the use of radar technology for surveillance purposes is gaining momentum, there has been no research to date on its application for prayer tracking and assistance systems. Furthermore, there is a lack of comprehensive research that covers all aspects of implementing such a system. Proposed approach offers a versatile solution that can be applied to a broad range of scenarios. Instead of utilizing raw I-Q data, we addressed the challenge of classification based on point cloud information generated by the conventional processing chain of the frequency-modulated continuous wave radar. This information contains corresponding range, reflection amplitude, Doppler and angular values. We have developed and compared different machine-learning classification algorithms to identify the most effective one. Our findings reveal that the convolutional neural network ResNet achieves the best results, with accuracy rates reaching up to 95.4 percent when applied to unknown data. The demonstration video of the developed system can be viewed at the following link: https://youtu.be/PnpGQZWqCr4.
Read the full abstract

Systems and Control

PCT-Based Trajectory Tracking for Underactuated Marine Vessels

This paper investigates the trajectory tracking problem of underactuated marine vessels within a polar coordinate framework. By introducing two polar coordinate transformations (PCTs), the original two-input-three-output second-order tracking model expressed in the Cartesian frame is reduced to a two-input-two-output feedback system. However, the resulting model does not necessarily satisfy the strict-feedback condition required by conventional backstepping approaches. To circumvent potential singularities arising in the controller design, a novel concept termed exponential modification of orientation (EMO) is proposed. While the PCTs yield substantial structural simplification, they also introduce inherent limitations, most notably singularities associated with angular coordinates. Addressing these singularities constitutes another key focus of this paper. Numerical simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.
Read the full abstract

Systems and Control

DRL-Based Phase Optimization for O-RIS in Dual-Hop Hard-Switching FSO/RIS-aided RF and UWOC Systems

This paper presents a dual-hop hybrid framework that integrates a free-space optical (FSO)/RIS-aided radio frequency (RF) link operating under a hard-switching protocol as the first hop, and an optical reconfigurable intelligent surface (O-RIS)-assisted underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) link as the second hop. To capture realistic underwater dynamics, the Oceanic Turbulence Optical Power Spectrum (OTOPS) is employed for accurate turbulence modeling. For efficient O-RIS phase control, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, specifically the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) and Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3), have been developed to optimize the phase shifts of O-RIS elements. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system substantially improves outage probability and channel capacity, with TD3 achieving superior robustness and adaptability. These findings highlight the DRL-enabled O-RIS as a promising approach for achieving reliable and high-capacity 6G cross-domain UWOC networks.
Read the full abstract

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

DHFP-PE: Dual-Precision Hybrid Floating Point Processing Element for AI Acceleration

The rapid adoption of low-precision arithmetic in artificial intelligence and edge computing has created a strong demand for energy-efficient and flexible floating-point multiply-accumulate (MAC) units. This paper presents a dual-precision floating-point MAC processing element supporting FP8 (E4M3, E5M2) and FP4 (2 x E2M1, 2 x E1M2) formats, specifically optimized for low-power and high-throughput AI workloads. The proposed architecture employs a novel bit-partitioning technique that enables a single 4-bit unit multiplier to operate either as a standard 4 x 4 multiplier for FP8 or as two parallel 2 x 2 multipliers for 2-bit operands, achieving maximum hardware utilization without duplicating logic. Implemented in 28 nm technology, the proposed PE achieves an operating frequency of 1.94 GHz with an area of 0.00396 mm^2 and power consumption of 2.13 mW, resulting in up to 60.4% area reduction and 86.6% power savings compared to state-of-the-art designs, making it well suited for energy-constrained AI inference and mixed-precision computing applications when deployed within larger accelerator architectures.
Read the full abstract

All authors Shubham Kumar, Vijay Pratap Sharma, Vaibhav Neema, Santosh Kumar Vishvakarma

Systems and Control

Distributed Covariance Steering via Non-Convex ADMM for Large-Scale Multi-Agent Systems

This paper studies the problem of steering large-scale multi-agent stochastic linear systems between Gaussian distributions under probabilistic collision avoidance constraints. We introduce a family of distributed covariance steering (DCS) methods based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), each offering different trade-offs between conservatism and computational efficiency. The first method, Full-Covariance-Consensus (FCC)-DCS, enforces consensus over both the means and covariances of neighboring agents, yielding the least conservative safe solutions. The second approach, Partial-Covariance-Consensus (PCC)-DCS, leverages the insight that safety can be maintained by exchanging only partial covariance information, reducing computational demands. The third method, Mean-Consensus (MC)-DCS, provides the most scalable alternative by requiring consensus only on mean states. Furthermore, we establish novel convergence guarantees for distributed ADMM with iteratively linearized non-convex constraints, covering a broad class of consensus optimization problems. This analysis proves convergence to stationary points for PCC-DCS and MC-DCS, while the convergence of FCC-DCS follows from standard ADMM theory. Simulations in 2D and 3D multi-agent environments verify safety, illustrate the trade-offs between methods, and demonstrate scalability to thousands of agents.
Read the full abstract

All authors Augustinos D. Saravanos, Isin M. Balci, Arshiya Taj Abdul, Efstathios Bakolas, Evangelos A. Theodorou