Papers

Existing voice deepfake detection and localization models rely heavily on representations extracted from speech foundation models (SFMs). However, downstream finetuning has now reached a state of diminishing returns. In this paper, we shift the focus to pretraining and propose a novel recipe that combines bottleneck masked embedding prediction with flow-matching based spectrogram reconstruction. The outcome, Alethia, is the first foundational audio encoder for various voice deepfake detection and localization tasks. We evaluate on $5$ different tasks with $56$ benchmark datasets, and note Alethia significantly outperforms state-of-the-art SFMs with superior robustness to real-world perturbations and zero-shot generalization to unseen domains (e.g., singing deepfakes). We also demonstrate the limitation of discrete targets in masked token prediction, and show the importance of continuous embedding prediction and generative pretraining for capturing deepfake artifacts.

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) and its sinusoidal subcarriers have underpinned the 4G and 5G eras, delivering high spectral efficiency and resilience to multipath fading through an efficient multicarrier architecture. However, as future systems move toward doubly dispersive environments driven by high-mobility applications and migration to mmWave/sub-THz bands, the time-invariance assumption underlying OFDM becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, and Doppler-induced degradation becomes prominent. While enhancements such as MIMO, advanced coding, and scheduling provide incremental remedies, they introduce additional overhead, because the sinusoidal subcarrier itself offers no inherent waveform-level robustness to Doppler impairments. Accordingly, two time-frequency spreading philosophies have emerged to improve Doppler resilience by distributing each symbol's energy across both dimensions of the time-frequency plane: (i) 2D isotropic spreading via the delay-Doppler (DD) domain, exemplified by the orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) family, and (ii) sheared spreading via parameterizable chirps, exemplified by the affine frequency-division multiplexing (AFDM) family. In this article, we examine key considerations for future waveform design across these paradigms and argue that transitioning from the sinusoidal subcarriers of OFDM to the chirp-based subcarriers offers a viable design direction for improving Doppler robustness while retaining much of the mature OFDM infrastructure. This perspective also highlights the suitability of chirp-based waveforms for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) and their extensibility to emerging physical-layer techniques. Overall, we argue that the transition from sinusoids to chirps is a technically motivated, compelling evolutionary direction for future wireless physical layer design.

The increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs), variable renewable energy sources, and emerging technologies presents new challenges for transmission system expansion planning (TSEP). Traditional snapshot-based and deterministic approaches are inadequate for capturing the temporal dynamics and operational constraints of modern power systems. This paper introduces an annual quasi-static time-series simulation (AQSTSS) framework that enables high-resolution, year-round modeling of transmission systems, incorporating detailed equipment behavior, control strategies, and DER interactions. By simulating system performance across all seasons and operating conditions, AQSTSS uncovers flexibility opportunities and operational constraints that static methods overlook. Applied to Hydro-Québec's projected 2035/2036 grid, the framework reveals critical insights under high wind and electric vehicle penetration. It also integrates an energy storage control strategy designed to mitigate wind variability and support grid reliability. Furthermore, AQSTSS facilitates the assessment of system resilience under diverse scenarios, including extreme weather and load variability. The simulation results underscore the importance of aligning planning with operational realities to ensure secure, efficient, and future-ready grid development. Overall, the proposed framework enhances the robustness of TSEP by bridging the gap between long-term planning and real-time operational needs.

We show that pretrained acoustic embeddings classify elephant vocalisations at a level approaching that of end-to-end supervised neural networks, without any fine-tuning of the embedding model. This result is of practical importance because annotated bioacoustic data are scarce and costly to obtain, leaving conventional supervised approaches prone to overfitting and to poor generalisation under domain shift. A broad range of embedding models drawn from general audio, speech, and bioacoustic domains is evaluated, all of which are either out-of-domain (containing no bioacoustic data) or out-of-species (containing no elephant call data). The embedding networks themselves remain fixed; only the lightweight downstream classifiers, which include a linear model and several small neural networks, are trained. Among the models considered, Perch 2.0 achieves the best cross-validated classification performance, attaining AUCs of 0.849 on African bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) calls and 0.936 on Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) calls, with Perch 1.0 close behind. The best-performing system is within 2.2 % of an end-to-end supervised elephant call classification system. A layerwise analysis of pretrained transformer encoders, considered as embedding models, shows that intermediate representations outperform final-layer outputs. The second layer of both wav2vec2.0 and HuBERT encodes sufficient information for effective elephant call classification; truncation at this layer therefore preserves classification performance whilst retaining only approximately 10 % of the parameters of the full network. Such compact embedding networks are well suited to on-device processing where computational resources are limited.

We investigate multi-objective adaptive beamformer design strategies for non-invasive microwave hyperthermia. Our focus is to address the challenges of maintaining focused power deposition in desired locations while reducing unwanted heating elsewhere under conditions of changing dielectric properties. The process of heating the media causes changes in the dielectric properties of the media, which can degrade the effectiveness beamformers with static weights. Typical hyperthermic beamformer designs calculate antenna beamforming weights using patient-specific high resolution dielectric maps obtained by MRI or microwave tomography, however this process is time consuming and difficult to perform in real-time. In this work, we explore the efficacy of microwave hyperthermia in various inhomogeneous media under changing dielectric conditions, with the goal of informing the design of future adaptive real-time microwave hyperthermia techniques. We aim to achieve cell apoptosis by obtaining temperatures of $\sim$ 45 $^\circ\text{C}$ through selective absorption of electromagnetic wave focusing at a 2.5 GHz carrier frequency with little to no knowledge of the changes in the dielectric media and simultaneously place nulls to avoid unwanted heating outside of the treatment zone. We investigate the effectiveness of the linear constrained minimum power (LCMP) algorithm for near-field multi-objective beamforming and examine the power density obtained from finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations on simple analytical models and anatomically realistic numerical breast phantoms. To gain a comprehensive knowledge of the efficacy of the beamformer we evaluate the resulting thermal maps of the models in simple homogeneous cases, heterogeneous cases and MRI-derived phantom breast models.

This paper addresses the problem of distributed state estimation for discrete-time linear time-invariant systems. Building on the framework proposed in Gao & Yang (2025), we exploit the Jordan canonical form of the system matrix to develop two distributed estimation schemes that ensure asymptotic convergence of local estimates to the true system state. In both approaches, each node reconstructs the components of the state that are locally detectable for it via a Luenberger observer, while employing a consensus-based mechanism to estimate the components that are not directly detectable. The first scheme relies on local observers whose dimension matches that of the original state vector; however, its applicability requires the satisfaction of a large set of inequalities. The second scheme, in contrast, can be implemented under less restrictive conditions, but results in observers of increased (augmented) order. For both methods, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions - expressed in terms of the eigenvalues of the system matrix and certain submatrices of the communication network Laplacian - that guarantee the existence of a distributed observer achieving asymptotically accurate estimation. Compared to Gao & Yang (2025), the proposed approaches offer greater flexibility in the selection of coupling gains and impose less stringent solvability conditions.

Many incentive design problems must contend with information asymmetries due to non-observation of efficiency (adverse selection) or non-observation of effort (moral hazard). And although a growing body of literature considers incentive design in control systems, the problem of designing incentives for control systems under information asymmetries has been less well-studied. This paper considers a model of moral hazard within control systems. In our model, the control system is described by an (affine) linear time-invariant (LTI) system with process noise. There is an agent who gets to choose (from between two choices) a linear state-feedback controller to apply to the LTI system, with one of the state-feedback controllers having a higher quadratic cost on the control inputs than the other. Our goal is to design a payment scheme that incentivizes the agent to choose the state-feedback controller that minimizes a quadratic cost on system states plus the time-discounted payment amount, subject to the understanding that the agent bears the control cost while being risk-averse with respect to their time-discounted payment. We formulate the problem as a constrained optimization, and prove that for a payment given after a fixed (but optimizable) time horizon the optimal payment scheme chooses the payment amount using a likelihood ratio hypothesis test. We numerically demonstrate our results by applying the derived optimal payment scheme to two examples: load frequency control (LFC) in power systems and wellness interventions for body weight loss.

Long gaps in time series are difficult to reconstruct reliably, and in power systems imputed load values inform dispatch and planning. Existing generative imputers are accurate but provide no finite-sample reliability guarantees under changing conditions. We introduce SPLICE (Self-supervised Predictive Latent Inpainting with Conformal Envelopes), which couples a JEPA encoder, a conditional latent bridge, an hourly-conditioned decoder, and Adaptive Conformal Inference (ACI). Controlled ablations indicate that long-horizon fidelity is driven more by the predictive representation than by generative complexity: under a matched bridge and decoder, JEPA outperforms reconstructive VAE and contrastive TS2Vec encoders, and once the representation is fixed a 5-step flow sampler matches or improves on a 50-step DDIM sampler at a 5-10x speedup. The same ordering is recovered on twelve hydrological catchments. Across thirteen load datasets at 91-day gaps, SPLICE attains the lowest mean Load-only MSE (0.056), winning 9 of 12 non-degenerate datasets against seven established baselines, and the best mean CRPS (0.182, 7.8% below the strongest competitor), while ACI holds 93-95% empirical coverage where static calibration under-covers by up to 7.5 percentage points. A pooled JEPA encoder transfers to four held-out datasets with only bridge and decoder adaptation.

Rapid aerodynamic evaluation is crucial for modern vehicle design, yet existing neural operators struggle to capture intricate spatial correlations. We propose the rotary-enhanced transformer operator (RETO), a novel neural solver featuring a dual-stage spatial awareness mechanism: sinusoidal-cosine encodings for global referencing and rotary positional encodings (RoPE) for relative displacements. RoPE encodes spatial relations via unitary rotations, enforcing translation invariance and enhancing local gradient resolution. RETO is validated on ShapeNet and the high-fidelity DrivAerML benchmark. On ShapeNet, RETO achieves a relative $L_2$ error of 0.063, outperforming RegDGCNN at 0.125 and representing a 16% improvement over the Transolver baseline, which yields an error of 0.075. These performance gains are further amplified on the DrivAerML dataset, where RETO achieves relative $L_2$ errors of 0.089 for surface pressure and 0.097 for velocity. In comparison, Transolver results in errors of 0.116 and 0.121 for the same metrics, indicating that RETO achieves precision enhancements of 23% and 19%, respectively. For comprehensive comparison, the surface pressure and velocity errors for AB-UBT are 0.102 and 0.124, while RegDGCNN yields 0.235 and 0.312, respectively. Information-theoretical analysis shows that the entropy peak of RETO at 0.35 is significantly lower than that of Transolver at 0.75 under $10^4$ resolution, indicating a focused attentional mechanism capable of preserving localized gradients against global diffusion.

We present TADI (Tool-Augmented Drilling Intelligence), an agentic AI system that transforms drilling operational data into evidence-based analytical intelligence. Applied to the Equinor Volve Field dataset, TADI integrates 1,759 daily drilling reports, selected WITSML real-time objects, 15,634 production records, formation tops, and perforations into a dual-store architecture: DuckDB for structured queries over 12 tables with 65,447 rows, and ChromaDB for semantic search over 36,709 embedded documents. Twelve domain-specialized tools, orchestrated by a large language model via iterative function calling, support multi-step evidence gathering that cross-references structured drilling measurements with daily report narratives. The system parses all 1,759 DDR XML files with zero errors, handles three incompatible well naming conventions, and is backed by 95 automated tests plus a 130-question stress-question taxonomy spanning six operational categories. We formalize the agent's behavior as a sequential tool-selection problem and propose the Evidence Grounding Score (EGS) as a simple grounding-compliance proxy based on measurements, attributed DDR quotations, and required answer sections. The complete 6,084-line, framework-free implementation is reproducible given the public Volve download and an API key, and the case studies and qualitative ablation analysis suggest that domain-specialized tool design, rather than model scale alone, is the primary driver of analytical quality in technical operations.

The proliferation of capable and efficient machine learning (ML) models marks one of the strongest methodological shifts in signal processing (SP) in its nearly 100-year history. ML models support the development of SP systems that represent complex, nonlinear relationships with high predictive accuracy. Adapting these models often requires sequential inference, which differs both theoretically and methodologically from the usual paradigm of ML, where data are often assumed independent and identically distributed. Gaussian processes (GPs) are a flexible yet principled framework for modeling random functions, and they have become increasingly relevant to SP as statistical and ML methods assume a more prominent role. We provide a self-contained, tutorial-style overview of GPs, with a particular focus on recent methodological advances in sequential, incremental, or streaming inference. We introduce these techniques from a signal-processing perspective while bridging them to recent advances in ML. Many of the developments we survey have direct applications to state-space modeling, sequential regression and forecasting, anomaly detection in time series, sequential Bayesian optimization, adaptive and active sensing, and sequential detection and decision-making. By organizing these advances from a signal-processing perspective, we intend to equip practitioners with practical tools and a coherent roadmap for deploying sequential GP models in real-world systems.

This work presents ThermoMesh, a passive thin-film thermoelectric mesh sensor designed to detect and characterize spatio-temporally sparse heat sources through conduction-based thermal imaging. The device integrates thermoelectric junctions with linear or nonlinear interlayer resistive elements to perform simultaneous sensing and in-sensor compression. We focus on the single-event (1-sparse) operation and define four performance metrics: range, efficiency, sensitivity, and accuracy. Numerical modeling shows that a linear resistive interlayer flattens the sensitivity distribution and improves minimum sensitivity by approximately tenfold for a $16\times16$ mesh. Nonlinear temperature-dependent interlayers further enhance minimum sensitivity at scale: a ceramic negative-temperature-coefficient (NTC) layer over 973-1273K yields a $\sim14{,}500\times$ higher minimum sensitivity than the linear design at a $200\times200$ mesh, while a VO$_2$ interlayer modeled across its metal-insulator transition (MIT) over 298-373K yields a $\sim24\times$ improvement. Using synthetic 1-sparse datasets with white boundary-channel noise at a signal-to-noise ratio of 40dB, the VO$_2$ case achieved $98\%$ localization accuracy, a mean absolute temperature error of $0.23$K, and a noise-equivalent temperature (NET) of $0.07$K. For the ceramic-NTC case no localization errors were observed under the tested conditions, with a mean absolute temperature error of $1.83$K and a NET of $1.49$K. These results indicate that ThermoMesh could enable energy-efficient embedded thermal sensing in scenarios where conventional infrared imaging is limited, such as molten-droplet detection or hot-spot monitoring in harsh environments.

This paper introduces a general approximate alternating simulation relation (\emph{$\varepsilon$-gAAS relation}) for continuous-time systems, which relaxes existing simulation relations to tolerate larger mismatches between abstract and concrete models. The definition of gAAS for continuous-time systems is first proposed, and its properties are investigated. Then, a control refinement method is developed to enable hierarchical control for the gAAS relation. Finally, case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, highlighting its advantages over existing methods.

The rapid electrification and intelligence of modern transportation systems place stringent demands on the electromagnetic compatibility, reliability, and adaptability of automotive power electronics. In electric and autonomous vehicles, electromagnetic interference (EMI) generated by high-frequency switching power converters can compromise safety-critical functions, in-vehicle communications, and system efficiency under dynamic operating conditions. Conventional passive EMI filters, while robust, are often oversized and lack adaptability, leading to increased weight, volume, and energy losses. This paper proposes an intelligent self-tuning active EMI filtering approach for electrified automotive power systems based on reinforcement learning (RL). The EMI mitigation problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, enabling an RL agent to continuously adapt filter parameters in response to time-varying interference characteristics. To improve robustness and generalisation under complex and non-stationary conditions, a variational autoencoder is employed for compact state representation, while a noise-based exploration mechanism enhances learning efficiency and prevents suboptimal convergence. The proposed method is evaluated using experimentally measured EMI spectra from an automotive electric drive unit within a MATLAB/Simulink co-simulation framework. Results demonstrate consistent EMI attenuation improvements of 25-30 dB across a wide frequency range compared with conventional control strategies and passive filtering solutions. By reducing reliance on oversized passive components and enabling adaptive EMI suppression, the proposed framework supports lightweight, energy-efficient, and reliable power-electronic systems for intelligent and green transportation applications.

Range anxiety and long recharging times remain critical barriers to electric vehicle adoption. Dynamic Inductive Charging (DIC) offers a compelling solution by enabling wireless power transfer while driving, potentially reducing battery size requirements and thus vehicle costs. However, DIC infrastructures are expensive and power-constrained, requiring intelligent resource allocation to maximize user satisfaction and economic viability. We propose a Model Predictive Control framework for optimal power allocation in DIC systems, using edge computing and vehicular communications to prioritize vehicles with critical battery states. The framework is implemented and evaluated through SUMO-based simulations on a realistic 10 km urban scenario in Istanbul, Turkey, under varying traffic intensities. Results demonstrate two critical limitations of uncoordinated allocation. First, resource utilization remains suboptimal despite available power when demand saturates system capacity. Second, when demand exceeds capacity, uniform distribution of power leaves a heavy tail of critically unsatisfied vehicles that may require emergency stops. Our MPC-based strategy addresses both regimes – maximizing power utilization during saturation through dynamic stripe rebalancing, and improving satisfaction fairness under scarcity by aggressively prioritizing depleted batteries at the expense of well-charged vehicles. The framework and simulation tools are released as open-source to support further research in this emerging domain.

Individualized Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression prediction requires models that use irregular visits, account for censoring, avoid diagnostic leakage, and provide calibrated horizon risks. We propose PROgression-aware MultI-horizon Survival Estimation for Alzheimer's Disease (PROMISE-AD), a leakage-safe survival framework for predicting conversion from cognitively normal (CN) to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and from MCI to AD dementia using ADNI/TADPOLE tabular histories. PROMISE-AD converts pre-index visits into tokens with standardized measurements, missingness masks, longitudinal changes, time-normalized slopes, visit timing, and non-diagnostic categorical attributes. A temporal Transformer fuses global, attention-pooled, and latest-visit representations to estimate a progression score and latent discrete-time mixture hazards. Training combines survival likelihood, horizon-specific focal risk loss, progression ranking, hazard smoothness, and mixture-balance regularization, followed by validation-set isotonic calibration for 1-, 2-, 3-, and 5-year risks. In held-out testing across three seeds, PROMISE-AD achieved an integrated Brier score (IBS) of 0.085 $\pm$ 0.012, C-index of 0.808 $\pm$ 0.015, and mean time-dependent AUC of 0.840 $\pm$ 0.081 for CN-to-MCI conversion, yielding the lowest IBS among compared methods. For MCI-to-AD conversion, PROMISE-AD achieved the highest C-index (0.894 $\pm$ 0.018) and near-ceiling 5-year discrimination (AUROC 0.997 $\pm$ 0.003; AUPRC 0.999 $\pm$ 0.001), although some baselines had lower IBS. Ablations and interpretability supported longitudinal change features, fused temporal representations, mixture hazards, cognitive and functional measures, APOE4 status, and recent conversion-proximal visits. These findings suggest that progression-aware survival modeling can provide interpretable multi-horizon AD conversion risk estimates.

This paper presents a real-world experimental analysis of a modular reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) prototype designed to operate in the 5G N78 band. Unlike most RIS studies in the literature that focus on simulations or controlled setups, the proposed system is validated through three phases consisting of indoor measurements, outdoor long-range tests, and deployment in a live commercial 5G standalone network. The RIS is exploited to enhance coverage in a non-line-of-sight (NLoS) zone, identified through baseline drive tests. Results show promising gains in RSRP and SINR, while also restoring 5G service at user locations where access was previously not available. The results highlight the practical potential of RIS for coverage enhancement in operational 5G networks.

Vehicular sensing-based intelligence has made substantial progress in transportation systems, leading to higher levels of safety and sustainability for smart cities and autonomous systems. This paper proposes a new approach to learn an interactive generalized dynamic Bayesian network (I-GDBN) model aiming to predict future LiDAR sensor blockages from time-sequence-based 3D point cloud perception. During learning, separate GDBN models are trained for various vehicles in normal and blockage situations. To perform the interaction between multiple vehicles, a high-level vocabulary is formed. Initially, during testing, the best generative model for either normal or blockage situations is selected. An interactive Markov jump particle filter (I-MJPF) is then proposed to leverage the probabilistic information provided by the I-GDBN to infer the blockages and detect the abnormalities at the high abstraction level. The proposed interactive model allows better self-aware and explainable capabilities that can adapt to blockage scenarios, which is also helpful when sensors fail to provide observations.

Joint image compression and wireless transmission remain relatively underexplored compared to generic image restoration, despite its importance in practical communication systems. We formulate this problem under an equivalent linear model, and propose Diffusion-OAMP, a training-free reconstruction framework that embeds a pre-trained diffusion model into the OAMP algorithm. In Diffusion-OAMP, the OAMP linear estimator produces pseudo-AWGN observations, while the diffusion model serves as a nonlinear estimator under an SNR-matching rule. This framework offers a way to incorporate multiple generative priors into OAMP. Experiments with varying compression ratios and noise levels show that Diffusion-OAMP performs favorably against classic methods in the evaluated settings.

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication depends on highly directional beamforming, while fast mobility, blockage, and rapid geometry changes in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) scenarios make beam tracking challenging. In cooperative multi-base-station (BS) systems, conventional hierarchical methods usually separate BS selection and beam selection, which may cause error propagation when beam states change abruptly. To address this issue, this paper proposes Cooperative Radio Sensing with Large Language Models (CRS-LLM), a cooperative beam prediction framework for next-step joint BS-beam prediction. CRS-LLM formulates beam tracking as a single classification problem over the joint BS-beam space, avoiding cascaded decision errors. To adapt channel state information (CSI) to large language models, a dual-view CSI tokenizer extracts frequency-domain and delay-domain channel features through a lightweight CNN front-end and temporal tokenization module. A truncated GPT-style backbone is then used for temporal modeling with parameter-efficient adaptation. In addition, a transition-aware switch-gated predictor combines a stable branch, a residual flip branch, and a low-rank transition prior to capture both smooth evolution and abrupt changes. Simulation results show that CRS-LLM outperforms CSI-Transformer, Hierarchical BS-Beam, and representative CNN- and recurrent-neural-network baselines in Top-1 accuracy and normalized beam gain under different SNR conditions, while also showing strong few-shot performance and promising zero-shot transferability.

Animals hear and vocalize across frequency ranges that differ substantially from humans, often extending into the ultrasonic domain. Yet most computational bioacoustics systems rely on audio models pre-trained at 16 kHz, restricting their usable bandwidth to the 0-8 kHz baseband and discarding higher-frequency information present in many bioacoustic recordings. We investigate a multi-band encoding framework that decomposes the full spectrum of animal calls into band features and fuses them into a unified representation. Similarity analyses on models show that certain encoders produce decorrelated band embeddings that improve class separation after fusion. Classification experiments on three bioacoustic datasets using eight pre-trained models and five fusion strategies show that fused representations consistently outperform the baseband and time-expansion baselines on two datasets, showing the potential of multi-band methods for full-spectrum encoding of animal calls.

This paper presents an expert-guided active-inference-inspired framework for adaptive UAV swarm trajectory planning. The proposed method converts multi-UAV trajectory design from a repeated combinatorial optimization problem into a hierarchical probabilistic inference problem. In the offline phase, a genetic-algorithm planner with repulsive-force collision avoidance (GA–RF) generates expert demonstrations, which are abstracted into Mission, Route, and Motion dictionaries. These dictionaries are used to learn a probabilistic world model that captures how expert mission allocations induce route orders and how route orders induce motion-level behaviors. During online operation, the UAV swarm evaluates candidate actions by forming posterior beliefs over symbolic states and minimizing KL-divergence-based abnormality indicators with respect to expert-derived reference distributions. This enables mission allocation, route insertion, motion adaptation, and collision-aware replanning without rerunning the offline optimizer. Bayesian state estimators, including EKF and PF modules, are integrated at the motion level to improve trajectory correction under uncertainty. Simulation results show that the proposed framework preserves expert-like planning structure while producing smoother and more stable behavior than modified Q-learning. Additional validation using real-flight UAV trajectory data demonstrates that the learned world model can correct symbolic predictions under noisy and non-smooth observations, supporting its applicability to adaptive UAV swarm autonomy.

This paper studies data-driven approaches to the continuous-time linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem based on two existing parameterizations, namely a closed-loop (CL) parameterization from behavioral system theory and an integral reinforcement learning (IRL) parameterization. The CL parameterization characterizes the closed-loop system via a matrix that satisfies equality constraints. While this parameterization has been extensively studied for discrete-time systems, we adapt key results to the continuous-time setting and develop a policy iteration (PI) scheme, derive a data-driven continuous-time algebraic Riccati equation (CARE), and introduce an alternative convex problem formulation. The IRL parameterization utilizes off-policy data to perform policy evaluation, which is then used for PI or value iteration. Within the IRL framework, we derive a policy gradient flow and propose convex reformulations of the LQR problem. Finally, we provide a unified treatment of these parameterizations that enables a systematic understanding of existing approaches and clarifies their structural relationships.

We introduce LRS-VoxMM, an in-the-wild benchmark for audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR). The benchmark is derived from VoxMM, a dataset of diverse real-world spoken conversations with human-annotated transcriptions. We select AVSR-suitable samples and preprocess them in an LRS-style format for direct use in existing AVSR pipelines. Compared with commonly used benchmarks, LRS-VoxMM covers a more diverse range of scenarios and acoustic conditions. We also release distorted evaluation sets with additive noise, reverberation, and bandwidth limitation to support evaluation under severe acoustic degradation. Experimental results show that LRS-VoxMM is considerably harder than LRS3 and that the contribution of visual information becomes more evident as the audio signal degrades. LRS-VoxMM supports more realistic AVSR benchmarking and encourages further research on the role of visual information in challenging real-world conditions.

We present a unifying Nearly Asymptotically Invariant Manifold (NAIM) framework for understanding Nesterovs Accelerated Gradient (NAG) method. By lifting the first-order gradient flow into a second-order phase space we construct a NAIM a slow, attracting graph and show that acceleration emerges from a curvature aware perturbation of this graph. The evolving slope of the perturbed manifold is governed by a Differential Riccati Equation (DRE), which enforces strict tangency of the vector field to the manifold surface. In the quadratic case the DRE reduces to an Algebraic Riccati Equation (ARE), and the requirement of spectral resonance equal contraction rates across all curvature modes uniquely determines the damping coefficient, directly yielding the continuous time Nesterov ODE. Fenichels theorem then extends this picture rigorously to general smooth, strongly convex landscapes: normal hyperbolicity guarantees persistence of the accelerated manifold despite varying Hessian curvature. The method is further extended to unified geometric derivation of NAG methods for smooth convex and strongly convex optimization in the discrete case. We exploit the underlying geometric structure and derive both cases from the same principle of preserving the projective structure under discretization process. A Lie Trotter splitting separates the linear dissipative dynamics from the nonlinear gradient flow. The dissipative subsystem is integrated by the Cayley (bilinear) transform, which preserves the underlying projective (Mobius) structure unconditionally and produces the classical Nesterov momentum coefficient as the unique Pade multiplier. For the convex case, projective flatness (vanishing Schwarzian derivative) uniquely selects the time-varying damping recovering the canonical Nesterov ODE for convex functions.

We study the design of functional incentive mechanisms for dynamical systems, in which a leader designs a fixed incentive function to motivate a self-interested follower to actuate the system beneficially over an extended horizon, without real-time revision of the incentive. This stands in contrast to the adaptive paradigm, in which the incentive is itself a continuously updated control variable. We formalize the problem as a discrete-time bi-level optimal control problem and derive analytical results for the linear-quadratic case with bilinear incentives and a myopic follower. Specifically, we establish a necessary and sufficient stability condition for the induced closed-loop system, derive a closed-form expression for the gradient of the expected leader cost with respect to the incentive parameter matrix, and obtain a fully closed-form cost expression in the scalar setting. Based on the latter, explicit characterizations of the optimal incentive parameter are provided in two asymptotic regimes: the infinite-horizon limit and the limit of high follower cost. For long horizons, the optimal incentive is shown to become independent of the follower's private cost parameter, with direct implications for robust mechanism design under private information.

In this paper, we extend our method [1] for FMCW radar mutual interference mitigation (IM) based on the discrete fractional Fourier transform (DFrFT). Firstly, we propose a radar signal processing chain including our DFrFT-based IM for real-valued receivers, which we compare to reference algorithms on a synthetic data set. We then reduce computational complexity by reformulating DFrFT-based IM in terms of sparse update signals, which enables mitigation of multiple interferences simultaneously. Finally, we conduct a case study on measurement data and show that our method is compatible with real-world environments.

This paper considers the robust control of a catenary robot composed of two quadrotors connected by an inextensible cable. The system is modeled on \(SE(3)\), with the cable treated as a geometric subsystem induced by the UAV configuration rather than as an independent dynamical element. The catenary shape determines configuration-dependent forces that couple the translational dynamics of the vehicles. We propose a geometric tracking controller for the relative configuration of the agents and analyze its robustness with respect to unstructured uncertainties in the catenary-induced forces. The main theoretical result establishes local input-to-state stability of the closed-loop tracking errors. In particular, we obtain asymptotic convergence in the nominal case and an explicit ultimate bound for the tracking errors under bounded catenary-force perturbations.

This paper investigates a framework that connects network training, independently certified population risk and sequential reliability in neural polar decoding. Network outputs determine information-bit decisions by their signs. Posterior mean-squared error (MSE) controls bit-error rate (BER), and a first-error identity connects errors evaluated with true preceding bits to sequential block-error rate (BLER). Three methods exploit sequential decoding structure to certify changes to trained receivers. First, distances from trained outputs to the zero decision threshold, termed learned margins, yield reliability bounds for over-parameterized neural network (ONN) updates subject to separate mean-squared output-change constraints at information positions. Second, a shared loss takes the largest block-error indicator difference between candidate decoders and successive cancellation (SC) on each frame. Its expectation bounds the corresponding BLER differences, termed excess BLER, for all fixed combinations of information-position implementations. An exact expression quantifies the gap between this shared bound and the largest BLER difference among fixed decoders. Third, verified linear programming (LP) and candidate-set subdivision tighten these guarantees with controllable computation at fixed confidence. ONN experiments assess conditional fitting and weight updates. Polar factor-graph experiments demonstrate reusable combination guarantees and storage reduction under prescribed excess-BLER allowances. Component timing identifies the dominant graph-propagation cost.

LoRa has become a widely adopted wireless modulation scheme in LPWANs due to its low cost, long range, and minimal transmission power. However, collisions between frames of the same spreading factor – common in dense LoRa deployments – prevent conventional LoRa receivers from detecting and correctly decoding frames. Recent work has introduced methods to improve recovery, yet their detection stage degrades sharply under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and high collision rates. In this work, we introduce LZn, a low-complexity synchronization scheme driven by a spectral intersection operation. Our method enables robust frame synchronization even under multiple packet overlaps or extremely low SNR conditions. We evaluate LZn on simulations and three independent, real-world LoRa datasets. LZn improves detection sensitivity by up to 10dB and increases detection probability by up to 1.54x. In real-world datasets, LZn improves decoding by 3.46x in the most challenging single-user scenario and up to 1.22x in collision scenarios compared to the second best collision-tolerant scheme (TnB). These results demonstrate that LZn substantially improves the frame recovery of LoRa receivers, while remaining compatible with real-time requirements.