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Electrical Engineering and Systems Science

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Sunday 3 May

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.NI

Toward Resilient 5G Networks: Comparative Analysis of Federated and Centralized Learning for RF Jamming Detection

Jamming attacks are proliferating and pose a significant threat to the security of 5G and beyond networks. These attacks target 5G radio frequency (RF) domain and can disrupt the communication in wireless networks. While conventional machine learning and deep learning approaches demonstrate its potential for jamming detection, they typically require centralized data collection, compromising the privacy of user equipment (UEs). This work proposes a federated learning (FL)-based jamming detection framework that operates on over-the-air In-phase and Quadrature (IQ) samples extracted from Synchronization Signal Blocks (SSBs) in the RF domain. The framework enables collaborative model training across multiple UEs without sharing raw RF signal data. We adopt Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm to train a 1D convolutional neural network (1DCNN) for effective detection of attacks. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed FL framework achieves 97% accuracy and 97% F1-score, outperforming centralized baselines including MLP, 1DCNN, SVM, and logistic regression, while preserving the data privacy of all participating UEs
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Systems and Control

Operator-Theoretic and physics-guided Sequence Modeling of Lithium-Ion Battery Voltage Dynamics

Lithium-ion batteries exhibit nonlinear voltage dynamics across varying operating conditions and aging states, making accurate modeling essential for estimation, control, and health monitoring. This work compares two data-driven frameworks for modeling voltage responses from hybrid pulse power characterization (HPPC) measurements: an operator-theoretic model based on Dynamic Mode Decomposition with control (DMDc), and a physics-guided transformer-based sequence model. In the DMDc framework, delay-embedded snapshots of terminal voltage and current are used to identify system matrices directly from measurement data, yielding an interpretable state-space model for recursive prediction. In parallel, a modified PatchTST architecture is developed in which terminal voltage is decomposed into an analytically computed open-circuit-voltage (OCV) component and a learned dynamic residual, with a future-current fusion pathway tailored to the prescribed HPPC current profile. Experimental results on a 30 Ah lithium-ion cell show that, although both models capture the sharp transient pulse dynamics, DMDc achieves lower prediction error and greater robustness to cell degradation under the present limited data regime, while the transformer captures qualitatively similar dynamics with greater architectural flexibility. These results highlight the advantages of operator-theoretic models in interpretability, computational efficiency, and robustness, while indicating the promise of physics-guided transformer models when larger and more diverse datasets are available.
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Systems and Control

A Graph Theoretic Approach in Combination With Dynamic Mode Decomposition With Control (DMDc) to Analyze Battery Degradation

Accurate monitoring of lithium-ion battery (LIB) degradation is essential, yet it remains challenging due to the complex, nonlinear, and time-varying nature of electrochemical aging processes. Conventional equivalent circuit models (ECMs) provide simplified representations of battery behavior using fixed electrical components, but they cannot capture evolving internal degradation mechanisms and structural changes over time. In this study, a data-driven framework is developed by integrating dynamic mode decomposition with control (DMDc) with graph-theoretic analysis to characterize battery degradation from operational data alone. The mode matrix ($\mathbf{\phi}$) obtained from DMDc is transformed into a weighted adjacency matrix, enabling the representation of battery dynamics as an evolving network of interacting states. Graph-based measures, including connectivity and a modularity (proxy), are then used to quantify structural changes in the system across degradation stages. The results show a clear transition from a highly connected and coherent network in the healthy state to a progressively weaker and more fragmented structure as degradation advances, accompanied by increasing heterogeneity. This work demonstrates that graph-theoretic representations can effectively capture the evolving dynamics of battery degradation and provide interpretable insights into system-level aging behavior.
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All authors Khalid Mahmud Labib, Saad Waheed, Bakhtiar Nafis, Shabbir Ahmed

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.SI

Computational foundations of the human world

Human societies continuously transform scattered information into collective judgments and coordinated action, whether through markets discovering prices, governments allocating resources, communities enforcing norms, or science converging on reliable claims. Importantly, the computational difficulty of collective decision-making, particularly the time and communication required to reach solutions, imposes fundamental constraints on social organization. While theoretical computer science offers formal tools for analyzing such problems, for instance, by analyzing resource requirements, including time and memory, surprisingly, there is no domain of social science that focuses on the nature of computation in the human world. This perspective argues that we now have the opportunity to deploy these computational frameworks to study human social organization, opening research directions at the intersection of computer science and social science. We highlight core social phenomena that can be framed as computational, including (i) distributed consensus and coordinated action, (ii) societal restructuring with scale, (iii) hierarchical and modular structure, and (iv) externalized memory systems. We identify several concepts from theoretical computer science that may provide insight into these phenomena, especially emphasizing more recently developed approaches beyond the paradigm of Turing~Machines and worst-case computational complexity.
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All authors Marcus J. Hamilton, Abhishek Yadav, Harrison Hartle, Jan Korbel, Niels Kornerup, Andrew J. Stier, Douglas H. Erwin, Hyejin Youn, Christopher P. Kempes, Hajime Shimao, Kyle Harper, James Evans, David H. Wolpert

Saturday 2 May

Signal Processing

A Wideband Narrow Beam 1x6 Linear Antenna Array for Automotive Radar and 5G Millimetre-Wave Applications

This paper presents the design and performance analysis of a 1x6 linear microstrip patch antenna array tailored for automotive radar and 5G millimetre-wave (mm-wave) applications. The proposed antenna array comprises six rectangular radiating patches with the primary patch excited using a microstrip feedline, while the remaining patches are interconnected through narrow microstrip lines with a width of 0.1 mm, enabling effective power distribution along the array. Optimal inter-element spacing facilitates constructive and destructive interference, enabling the formation of a narrow beam with enhanced directivity and a wide operational bandwidth. The high-gain radiation characteristics are achieved through the combined effects of the six-element linear configuration and precise impedance matching. Key performance metrics including reflection coefficient, current distribution, and radiation patterns have been analysed. Results demonstrate a reflection coefficient better than 10 dB across the target frequency range and a narrow beamwidth with high directivity, making the array suitable for high-resolution automotive radar and 5G mm-wave communications. Potential applications include vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) radar sensing, lane change detection, blind spot monitoring at 28 GHz, and high-capacity point-to-point wireless backhaul links. The design offers a promising solution for compact, high-performance beamforming antenna systems in intelligent transportation and next-generation wireless networks.
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Signal Processing

Why Model Selection Fails in Time Series Forecasting: An Empirical Study of Instability Across Data Regimes

Time series forecasting models often exhibit inconsistent performance across datasets with varying statistical and structural properties. Despite the wide range of available forecasting techniques, it remains unclear whether model selection can be reliably guided by simple data characteristics. This paper investigates why rule-based model selection fails in time series forecasting by analyzing the relationship between data-regime descriptors and model performance. A descriptor-based framework is introduced to characterize time series using measurable properties, including trend strength, seasonality, noise level, and temporal dependence. Based on these descriptors, a rule-based selection mechanism is formulated to map data regimes to candidate forecasting models. The approach is evaluated on multiple real-world datasets across different domains and forecasting horizons. The results show that rule-based model selection achieves low accuracy, with correct model identification occurring in only a small fraction of cases. Significant discrepancies are observed between recommended and empirically optimal models, particularly in noisy and mixed regimes. Further analysis reveals that model performance is highly sensitive to both dataset characteristics and forecasting horizon, resulting in substantial ranking instability across scenarios. These findings explain why simple heuristic rules fail to generalize and demonstrate that forecasting performance cannot be reliably predicted using static, descriptor-based approaches. This study provides empirical evidence that model selection in time series forecasting is inherently context-dependent and highlights the need for more adaptive, data-driven strategies.
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Audio and Speech Processing

Toward Fair Speech Technologies: A Comprehensive Survey of Bias and Fairness in Speech AI

Speech technologies are deployed in high-stakes settings, yet fairness concerns remain fragmented across tasks and disciplines. Existing surveys either adopt a general machine-learning perspective that overlooks speech-specific properties or focus on a single task, missing failure patterns shared across the speech domain. Synthesizing over 400 studies spanning generation and perception tasks and emerging speech-language models, this survey presents a unified framework that links formal fairness definitions to evaluation, diagnosis, and mitigation. We formalize seven fairness definitions adapted to the speech modality and organize the field's conceptual expansion through three paradigms: Robustness, Representation, and Governance. We then ground evaluation metrics in the mathematical cores of these definitions, organizing them into six families and mapping each family back to the definitions it operationalizes. We diagnose bias sources along the speech processing pipeline, surfacing speech-specific mechanisms such as channel bias as a demographic proxy and annotation subjectivity in emotion labels. We systematize mitigation strategies across four intervention stages, mapping each to the diagnosed sources. Finally, we identify open challenges and propose directions for future research.
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All authors Yi-Cheng Lin, Yun-Shao Tsai, Kuan-Yu Chen, Hsiao-Ying Huang, Huang-Cheng Chou, Shrikanth Narayanan, Yu Tsao, Jian-Jiun Ding, Hung-yi Lee

Signal Processing

Sparsity and Resolvability: Re-evaluating Channel Representations For Next Generation Networks

As wireless networks transition toward 6G, high mobility, clustered scattering, and hardware impairments increasingly challenge classical assumptions on channel sparsity, resolvability, and stationarity. In these regimes, performance assessments based on apparent sparsity or nominal delay and Doppler separation can be misleading, since finite observation, sampling granularity, windowing, and fractional delay or Doppler spreading introduce coupling and leakage that reshape the effective channel seen by the receiver. This article provides a signal processing centric framework that links sparsity, resolvability, and selectivity through receiver observable indicators, including the fraction of power captured by dominant coefficients, the level of coefficient correlation, the effective delay and Doppler resolving capability over the observation window, and processing induced leakage. Building on these observations, we propose an interchanged domain frame concept principle, where the representation and the degree of component separation are adapted according to the propagation regime, the effective SNR under impairments, and the application objective. Using the Extended Vehicular A channel profile as a running case study, we show how different representations lead to different equalization and detection behavior, with implications for communication, sensing, and physical layer security.
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Signal Processing

Channel-Aware Waveform Selection Criteria Across Different Waveform Domains

Waveform evaluation for sixth generation (6G) networks has largely relied on sparse and quasi-stationary channel models that enabled mathematical tractability, diversity gains, and Doppler robustness. However, such models obscure the propagation complexity of dense urban environments, high mobility scenarios, and heterogeneous network deployments. This paper sheds light on a generalized and scalable channel model that incorporates cluster birth-death dynamics, Doppler spectral spreading, time-varying delays, and piecewise local stationarity. Based on this model, the effective input-output relationships of the main 6G waveforms are derived, exposing waveform dependent interference structures that remain hidden under conventional sparse assumptions. Building on these effective channels, a channel-aware waveform prioritization framework is developed based on delay-Doppler resolvability, stationarity conditions, effective signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and user equipment (UE) cell distribution. Simulation results under the proposed channel model using 3GPP CDL parameters confirm that affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) and orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) retain their spectral efficiency advantage and path combining gains only under sparse, resolvable, stationarity conditions, whereas orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and discrete Fourier transform spread (DFT-s)-OFDM can be both tuned to achieve superior reliability and more stable performance under the proposed channel model.
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Systems and Control

Hybrid Optimal Control of Homogeneous Epidemiological Compartmental Models with Regime Switching

Optimal intervention design is formulated as a hybrid optimal control problem for multiphase homogeneous epidemiological systems. The system extends a foundational compartmental model through intermediate phases that incorporate work-from-home (WFH) policies and a vaccination protocol, yielding a four-phase hybrid system that captures policy escalation and relaxation. Key characteristics of the resulting hybrid system include (i) phase-dependent continuous dynamics and running costs that respectively capture distinct disease transmission mechanisms and shifting public health socioeconomic trade-offs, (ii) a combination of autonomous and controlled switchings for intervention policies, whose times are co-optimized - whether indirectly via state thresholds or directly as decision variables alongside continuous inputs to minimize the overall cost, and (iii) nontrivial state jump maps that govern transitions between phases with differing state and control space dimensions. The Hybrid Minimum Principle (HMP) is invoked to obtain the optimal solutions. Numerical results demonstrate that coordinating WFH policies with vaccination efforts provides improved mitigation of disease spread compared to single-phase policy interventions.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

A Measure-Theoretic Formulation of Behavioral Systems

In Willems' behavioral systems theory, a dynamical system is identified with the set of all trajectories compatible with its laws of motion. In the linear time-invariant setting this trajectory set is a linear subspace, and its algebraic structure underpins the Fundamental Lemma: a single persistently exciting data trajectory generates the entire finite-horizon behavior. For nonlinear or stochastic systems, however, the admissible trajectory set is generally nonconvex, obstructing direct optimization over the behavior. In this paper, we lift the behavioral viewpoint from trajectories to probability measures on trajectories by representing a finite-horizon dynamical system with the set of all Borel probability measures supported on its admissible trajectories. For deterministic systems, this behavioral-measure set is convex and weakly closed even when the dynamics are nonlinear, because convex combinations of trajectory distributions remain dynamically admissible even when convex combinations of trajectories do not. Its extreme points are precisely the Dirac masses on individual admissible trajectories, so the classical deterministic theory is embedded as the extremal skeleton of the richer measure-valued object. On this foundation we establish two core deterministic results and outline a stochastic extension based on history-conditional kernel consistency.
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Systems and Control

A Universal Optimal Control Strategy for a Tailsitter UAV

This work develops a unified optimal control framework for a Quadrotor Biplane tailsitter UAV capable of operating seamlessly across hover, transition, and cruise flight regimes. Although the tailsitter configuration enables mechanically simple mode switching, the transition maneuver remains challenging due to strong nonlinearities and rapidly varying aerodynamics. To address this, a trajectory optimization scheme based on nonlinear programming with direct collocation is formulated, incorporating nonlinear dynamics, actuator limits, and angle-of-attack constraints. The resulting optimal trajectories are safe, reliable, and time-efficient. For the cruise-to-hover maneuver, optimal trajectories are generated over a range of initial cruise velocities and subsequently learned using feedforward multilayer neural networks. The learned model generalizes across operating conditions and enables real-time generation of constraint-satisfying transition trajectories. These trajectories provide both feedforward control inputs and reference state profiles, which are tracked using a Model Predictive Controller (MPC). The MPC eliminates the need for controller switching or gain scheduling across flight envelopes, enabling a single universal controller for hover, transition, and cruise. A nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (DI) controller is also designed for comparison. Two numerical schemes for MPC are implemented and evaluated. Simulation results across all flight modes demonstrate that MPC achieves superior robustness to parameter uncertainties compared to DI. A computational cost analysis further highlights the trade-off between execution time and performance for the different MPC solvers.
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Systems and Control

Physics Driven Digital Twin Model for Evaluation of GNSS User Receiver Equipment

This paper presents a physics-consistent digital twin framework for end-to-end modeling and evaluation of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) user receiver equipment. In contrast to conventional GNSS simulations that rely on predefined signal models, the proposed framework enforces dynamic consistency between satellite ephemerides, user motion, and received signal observables through trajectory-driven injection of code-phase and Doppler dynamics. The GPS L1 C/A signal is synthesized in accordance with the IS-GPS-200 Rev. N specification, with motion-induced effects derived directly from orbital and user kinematics, and augmented by ionospheric and tropospheric delay models. The resulting complex baseband signal is converted to radio frequency using a software-defined radio platform disciplined by an external reference clock, enabling seamless hardware-in-the-loop integration with commercial and software receivers. Validation across static, moderate-motion, and high-dynamics scenarios, including projectile-like trajectories, demonstrates close agreement between truth-model and receiver-estimated code phase, Doppler, and position, as well as strong correspondence between simulated and measured intermediate frequency spectra. The results establish the proposed digital twin as a high-fidelity, repeatable, and physically consistent platform for GNSS receiver evaluation, tracking-loop stress testing, and development of robust navigation algorithms.
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All authors Jitu Sanwale, Mangal Kothari, Hari B. Hablani, Suresh Dahiya

Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.LG

ECG-biometrics-bench: A Unified Framework for Reproducible Benchmarking of ECG Biometrics

Electrocardiogram (ECG) biometrics have emerged as a promising modality for continuous, liveness-aware authentication in wearable systems. However, many prior studies report overly optimistic results due to data leakage (e.g., random splits within the same session). To address this issue, we introduce ECG-biometrics-bench, a modular, reproducible benchmarking framework that standardizes preprocessing, segmentation, and evaluation across seven widely used public ECG datasets spanning clinical, ambulatory, and large-scale cohort settings. The framework supports both closed-set and open-set (i.e., subject-disjoint generalization in this work) evaluation, as well as progressively realistic protocols including cross-session and long-term temporal separation. To facilitate reproducible research in the community, the ECG-biometrics-bench repository will be made publicly accessible on GitHub upon the acceptance of this manuscript. Through a comprehensive multi-dataset analysis, we expose the Random Split Fallacy, demonstrating that intra-session evaluation protocols artificially inflate performance while masking severe degradation caused by temporal drift and unseen identities. Furthermore, by evaluating multiple architectures, including DeepECG, ResNet1D, and CNN-LSTM, we show that these failures are not model-specific but are likely inherent to current supervised feature-learning paradigms. Finally, we demonstrate that performance degradation due to temporal aging can be partially mitigated through a heavy enrollment, lightweight authentication strategy based on dynamic multi-session template fusion. These findings establish a more realistic baseline for ECG biometrics and highlight critical challenges that must be addressed for reliable real-world deployment.
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Signal Processing

A Miniaturized In-Mouth pH Sensing System for Real-Time Intraoral Telemetry

Dental caries is one of the most common chronic diseases worldwide, caused by acid production from bacterial metabolism of fermentable carbohydrates and affecting people of all ages. To evaluate the cariogenic and erosive properties of widely consumed food products, such as energy drinks, intraoral pH changes are measured during consumption. The gold standard for such measurements is miniaturized silicon-lithium-barium glass membrane electrodes. These electrodes allow dental plaque to form on their surface, thereby enabling in situ monitoring of pH changes in a biologically relevant environment. Due to their high impedance and susceptibility to external interference, they can currently only be measured using a large analog amplification and recording unit, which is highly limiting for study design and participant comfort, as individual measurements can take upwards of an hour. This work presents the first battery-powered, low power wireless and wearable pH telemetry evaluation system designed for real time intraoral pH monitoring with glass electrodes. The system comprises a miniaturized pH telemetry frontend, a neck-worn Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) node, and software tools for data acquisition, visualization, and reporting. The front end integrates with a custom dental prosthesis, directly digitizing the pH signal in the mouth and minimizing noise. The data is transmitted over BLE to a host computer, and analyzed using dedicated software that supports calibration, drift compensation, region marking, and PDF report generation. The system integrates an 8.6 by 3.3 mm, 0.2 g pH front-end and a 37.6 g neck-worn BLE node which consume 8.89 mW to transmit data at 10 Hz to a host computer during a measurement.
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All authors Lukas Schulthess, Philipp Schilk, Julian Moosmann, Andrea Gubler, Christian Vogt, Florian J. Wegehaupt, Michele Magno

Signal Processing

Physics-Guided Deep Learning For High Resolution X-ray Imaging

Imperfections in X-ray imaging systems can limit their performance, especially in High Energy Density (HED) or Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE)-relevant experiments that are typically single shot, by introducing structured, non-stationary features that overlap with the signal of interest. When the X-ray transmission is reconstructed by typical flat-field normalization, even small shot-to-shot drift of structured features imprints residual patterns onto transmission maps, degrading signal visibility and biasing measurements such as electron density, velocity and feature sizes. We investigate this limitation by modeling the artifacts as a separable feature layer and training a U-Net architecture to estimate and infer them directly from the experimental data. We compare our method against Fourier filtering and more advanced procedures like Dynamic Flat-Field Normalization (DFFN) to evaluate artifact suppression capability and signal preservation in the reconstructed transmission maps. In multiple synthetic injection tests, our Physics-Guided Deep Learning approach is able to obtain an improvement in mean Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) from 0.345 to 0.906 and from 0.0679 to 0.945, while better preserving filament profiles and reducing degradation of the filament signal during artifact suppression. Additionally, we utilize deep ensembles to obtain predictive epistemic uncertainty estimates for the U-Net based reconstruction, to ensure Out Of Distribution (OOD) robustness for this procedure.
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All authors Shao Xian Lee, Aashwin Ananda Mishra, Ariel Arnott, Meriame Berboucha, Nina Boiadjieva, Gourab Chatterjee, Eric Cunningham, Nick Czapla, Gilliss Dyer, Jonathan Ehni, Robert Ettelbrick, Anna Grassi, Mickael Grech, Philip Hart, Dimitri Khaghani, Hae Ja Lee, Peregrine McGehee, Bob Nagler, Paul Neumayer, Caterina Riconda, Marc Welch, Andrea Zabala, Eric Galtier, Quynh L. Nguyen

Signal Processing

A Time-Synchronized Video Reference System for Data Analysis of Body-Attached Sensor Nodes in Outdoor Scenarios

Wearable body-attached multi-sensor systems enable detailed analysis of human motion and physiological signals in sports, rehabilitation, and movement research. While wireless synchronization techniques can reliably align sensor data streams, interpreting and validating complex or unconstrained activities often requires an additional, objective visual reference. Existing laboratory-grade reference systems provide high accuracy but are impractical for outdoor or field deployments. In contrast, commercial video timecode solutions typically rely on local device-to-device synchronization, which increases the power required to maintain synchronization. This is not desirable in many application scenarios. This paper presents a lightweight Timecode Generator (TCG) that converts Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-derived time directly into a Linear Timecode (LTC) signal that is injected into the recording via a camera audio channel. The approach eliminates continuous handshaking, allowing the system to be activated immediately before the action of interest, thus reducing power consumption and enabling smaller batteries and unobtrusive hardware designs of body-attached sensor nodes. The TCG supports common video frame rates of 24, 25, and 30 frames per second (fps). Experimental evaluation confirms that accurate time alignment is maintained for several minutes without GNSS updates. At 30 fps, the alignment duration is 543 s before a potential frame-level shift occurs. With an average power consumption of 35.37 mW, the system achieves an operating time of up to 75 h when powered by two standard AAA alkaline batteries.
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All authors Lukas Schulthess, Fabian Pleisch, Matheo Käch, Björn P. Bruhin, Michele Magno, Luca Benini, Christoph Leitner

Image and Video Processing · Cross-listed from physics.med-ph

Automatic Aberration Correction for Transcranial Functional and Super-Resolution Ultrasound Imaging in Rodents and Nonhuman Primates

Skull-induced aberrations remain a major drawback of transcranial ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM), degrading sensitivity and spatial accuracy through microbubble mislocalization, false detections, and imaging artifacts, such as disconnected or duplicated vessels. Here, we present a differentiable beamforming framework for automatic aberration correction in transcranial Doppler and ULM. Our approach uses spatially distributed delay-based parameterization of the aberration that is optimized in a closed-loop manner using angular coherence as an objective function. We demonstrate robust improvements of transcranial ULM, in vivo, with enhanced resolution of both mouse and nonhuman primate (NHP) brains. We also extended differentiable beamforming to functional measurements, with improvements in the sensitivity of transcranial functional ultrasound (fUS) and ULM based hemodynamic quantification. Extending this approach to 3D transcranial ULM imaging in NHPs, we show efficient correction of skull induced aberrations and removal of artifacts, such as vessel duplications. By providing a fully automated and generalizable solution for aberration correction, this work lowers a major technical barrier to transcranial ultrasound imaging, enabling broader adoption of non-invasive, super-resolution and functional neuroimaging across laboratories and across species.
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All authors Paul Xing, Antoine Malescot, Eric Martineau, Stephan Quessy, Ravi L. Rungta, Numa Dancause, Jean Provost

Systems and Control

Recommender Systems as Control Systems

We propose a control-theoretic interpretation of recommender systems and use this perspective to analyze how fairness interventions shape long-term system behavior. Fairness concerns arise for both users and creators, ranging from opinion polarization and representation bias on the user side to popularity bias on the creator side. A central insight of our analysis is that fairness should not be viewed as a simple trade-off against utility. When optimized over time, it can in fact be beneficial for overall system performance. Realizing these gains, however, requires a clear understanding of the underlying dynamics.
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Signal Processing

Doppler Tomography Using Rydberg Sensors

Novel sensors that leverage the quantum properties of atoms for measuring propagating electromagnetic fields are becoming increasingly practical for a variety of applications. These sensors rely on the phenomenon of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), which is induced in a confined vapor of alkali atoms when the atoms are excited to a high-energy quantum state, known as a Rydberg state, with multiple resonant optical fields. In this state, the atoms are highly sensitive to electromagnetic radiation and yield a measurement output proportional to the magnitude of an impinging electric field when resonant with a Rydberg-Rydberg transition. In this paper, we consider the use of Rydberg sensors for a tomographic imaging application through a set of modeled system dynamics. Our contribution includes a novel method for placing nulls in the image by modulating the radiated local oscillator (LO) that is used to recover phase information from the received signal. We also present an algorithm for deblurring the image.
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Systems and Control

Point-to-Cloud NMPC with Smooth Avoidance Constraints

This paper proposes a finite-horizon optimal control strategy for set-point tracking using a nonlinear model predictive control framework with integrated avoidance capabilities. The formulation employs a smooth point-to-cloud distance metric that ensures continuously differentiable and numerically well-conditioned gradients, even in the presence of regions with complex and nonconvex geometries. This smoothness allows safety constraints to be formulated consistently and differentiably through control barrier functions, resulting in a reliable avoidance behavior for the closed-loop system. Additionally, stationary artificial variables are introduced in the optimal control problem to preserve feasibility under changing set-points. The proposed approach is validated through numerical experiments of an aerial robot, demonstrating accurate tracking and smooth obstacle avoidance in complex environments.
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All authors Brener G. Ferreira, Vinicius M. Gonçalves, Marcelo A. Santos, Guilherme V. Raffo

Systems and Control

Quasi-Static Control of Discrete Cosserat Rod

In this paper, we design feedback control laws for soft robots modelled using the Cosserat rod theory, which is spatially discretised using the Piecewise Constant Strain (PCS) approach. The PCS approach approximates the nonlinear PDEs describing the Cosserat rod by a finite-dimensional system of nonlinear ODEs. This simplification results in a model describing soft robots which is similar to the serial rigid-link manipulators. We design feedback control laws for the quasi-static PCS model by using external wrenches as control inputs. The control laws are designed based on feedback linearisation in strain and task spaces. An extensive set of numerical results demonstrates the performance of the control laws for end-effector trajectory tracking and shape control of soft robots.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.IT

RIS Optimization and Scaling Laws in Multi-Operator Systems: Is Quadratic Scaling Achievable?

This paper studies multi-operator wireless communication systems aided by general reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), including both conventional single-connected RIS and beyond-diagonal RIS (BD-RIS). Specifically, we consider a system where multiple operators coexist in the same area over different frequency bands, each with a single-antenna base station, while one operator serves its single-antenna user with the aid of an RIS. In such a system, the RIS may unintentionally reflect signals from the non-serving operators, leading to inter-operator interference and rapid fluctuations of their effective channels. To address this issue, we propose a practical RIS design framework that maximizes the received signal power of the serving operator while enforcing fixed RIS-reflected channels of the non-serving operators. We derive closed-form solutions to the resulting optimization problem, based on a novel technique to deal with the coupled unitary and linear equality constraints. We further give scaling law analysis of the received signal power. For a two-operator system, the received signal power scales quadratically with the number of RIS elements for group-connected BD-RIS with group size Gs>=2, whereas for conventional single-connected RIS it scales only linearly. More generally, for an L-operator system with L-1 non-serving operators, the scaling-law transition occurs at Gs=L, where quadratic scaling is achieved when Gs>=L, and linear scaling otherwise. These results demonstrate that, in a multi-operator system, quadratic scaling is achievable only with BD-RIS architectures having enough interconnections. Simulation results validate the analysis and show the significant gain of BD-RIS over conventional RIS in multi-operator systems. In particular, group-connected BD-RIS with Gs=2 achieves a 13dB gain over conventional RIS in a two-operator system with a 128-element RIS.
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Signal Processing

MU-SHOT-Fi: Self-Supervised Multi-User Wi-Fi Sensing with Source-free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Deep learning has been widely adopted for WiFi CSI-based human activity recognition (HAR) due to its ability to learn spatio-temporal features in a privacy-preserving and cost-effective manner. However, DL-based models generalize poorly across environments, a challenge amplified in multi-user settings where overlapping activities cause CSI entanglement and domain shifts. Practical deployments often limit access to labeled source data due to privacy constraints, motivating source-free adaptation using only unlabeled target-domain CSI and a pre-trained source model. In this paper, we propose MU-SHOT-Fi, a source-free unsupervised domain adaptation framework for single- and multi-user Wi-Fi sensing. MU-SHOT-Fi employs permutation-invariant set prediction with Hungarian matching during source training, followed by frozen-classifier backbone adaptation in the target domain. To enable stable adaptation without labels, we introduce occupancy-weighted information maximization that prevents model collapse by focusing diversity regularization on likely-occupied slots while excluding the dominant class from marginal entropy. Additionally, we employ binary rotation prediction as spatial self-supervision that exploits CSI frequency-time structure to learn domain-invariant features. For single-user scenarios, we introduce SU-SHOT-Fi by replacing occupancy weighting with standard information maximization and incorporating contrastive predictive coding to exploit temporal consistency. Extensive experiments on the WiMANS and Widar 3.0 datasets across cross-environment, cross-frequency, cross-orientation, and combined domain shifts demonstrate that MU-SHOT-Fi effectively recovers multi-user exact-activity classification performance under large domain shifts while maintaining accurate occupancy estimation and preventing collapse toward dominant classes.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from quant-ph

From Characterization To Construction: Generative Quantum Circuit Synthesis from Gate Set Tomography Data

High-fidelity circuit execution on noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices is bottlenecked by compilation pipelines that disregard complex, correlated noise. To address this, this methodology article proposes a quantum machine learning control (QMLC) framework for generative quantum circuit synthesis from gate-set tomography (GST) data that bypasses the traditional two-step pipeline of characterizing native quantum gates via GST followed by unitary decomposition algorithms. Instead, a generative concept space is directly learnt from GST data, enabling conditional synthesis of quantum circuits on a desired output distribution. Our approach tokenizes GST germ circuits and embeds them into a structured latent space using a curriculum-learning-motivated strategy, starting with short circuits and progressively incorporating longer ones with diverse output statistics. The embedded sequences are processed by a set-vision transformer with permutation-invariant pooling, producing k-seed vectors that represent the learned concept space of the quantum device. Aggregating data across multiple circuits makes this latent representation inherently context-aware, capturing the shared physical noise environment (e.g., crosstalk, drift) that isolated gate metrics miss. We propose an unconditional diffusion model to sample from the concept space. During inference, a user provides a target measurement distribution, and the model generates a corresponding circuit. To ensure fidelity and robustness, the output is denoised using a diffusion model that operates on the target conditional covariance matrix. This end-to-end framework is a step towards context-aware, hardware-native circuit synthesis directly from raw GST data, which offers a new paradigm for integrating quantum control and compilation. The QMLC framework is particularly suited for near-term quantum devices with complex calibration procedures.
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All authors King Yiu Yu, Aritra Sarkar, Erbing Hua, Maximilian Rimbach-Russ, Ryoichi Ishihara, Sebastian Feld

Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG

Toward a foundational thermal model for residential buildings

The building energy community lacks a foundational thermal model, i.e., a single pretrained model capable of generalizing across diverse buildings, climates, and control strategies without building-specific calibration. Achieving this vision requires architectural principles that capture universal thermal dynamics rather than memorizing building-specific patterns. We take a step toward this goal by presenting a physics-informed transformer architecture that embeds domain knowledge, e.g., derivative enrichment and Euler-based numerical integration, into a decoder-only framework. We incorporate static building features extracted from simulation models and employ Rotary Position Embedding attention to capture temporal dependencies. Evaluated on the CityLearn dataset spanning 247 residential buildings across three climate zones, our model achieves one-step prediction accuracy (RMSE of 0.30{\deg}C in Texas, 0.29{\deg}C in Vermont) while outperforming both traditional baselines and fine-tuned Time-Series Foundation Models. We also demonstrate zero-shot transferability: models trained on as few as two buildings generalize to unseen buildings and climate zones without fine-tuning. Despite the limitation of simulated residential buildings, our results establish physics-informed architectural principles as a promising foundation for universal building thermal models.
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All authors Ting-Yu Dai, Kingsley Nweye, Dev Niyogi, Zoltan Nagy

Systems and Control

Coordination Architecture Shapes Continuous Demand Response Outcomes in Building Districts

Grid-integrated building districts must provide energy flexibility while preserving occupant comfort and equitable distribution of control burden. We study how coordination architecture influences the ability of building clusters to track aggregated load profiles, comparing four paradigms: centralized model predictive control (MPC), decentralized independent reinforcement learning (SAC), centralized-training-decentralized-execution multi-agent RL (MAPPO), and a hybrid MPC–SAC controller that separates district-level battery optimization from building-level HVAC regulation. A rule-based controller serves as a baseline. We evaluate a 25-building residential district across three metrics: aggregate load tracking, thermal comfort, and spatial variability of control actions. We find that architecture choice determines the trade-off structure. Centralized MPC achieves low tracking bias (8.8% NMBE) but concentrates actuation on a subset of buildings, causing elevated comfort violations (24.8% exceedance) and spatial imbalance. Decentralized RL distributes control effort more evenly but fails to sustain accurate tracking. The hybrid architecture achieves the best balance: accurate tracking (4.8% NMBE), moderate comfort impact (16.8% exceedance), and the lowest spatial variability. These findings demonstrate that architecture choice determines the trade-off structure between tracking and comfort.
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Systems and Control

Sequentially decoupling estimators for Box-Jenkins model estimation

In this paper, we propose a consistent and asymptotically efficient estimation method for Box-Jenkins (BJ) models that is applicable under both open-loop and closed-loop data conditions, serving as a possible alternative to the weighted null-space fitting approach. The method comprises two stages: an initial sequentially decoupling (SD) estimator, followed by Gauss-Newton (GN) refinement step. The SD estimator is constructed from three sequential least squares (LS) estimators: (i) estimation of a high-order autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (ARX) model; (ii) estimation of the BJ model's dynamic model via an auxiliary output-error (OE) model; and (iii) estimation of the noise model of the BJ model using another auxiliary OE model. We establish the consistency of the SD estimator under standard regularity conditions, leveraging the consistency of the underlying LS estimators for both the ARX and OE models. Moreover, we show that one-step GN iteration starting from the SD estimator yields an estimator that is asymptotically equivalent to the prediction error method, provided the ARX model order satisfies a mild growth condition. Simulation studies confirm the theoretical properties of the proposed method.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from math.OC

Unified Lyapunov Method for ISS of PDEs: A Tutorial on Constructing Generalized Lyapunov Functionals for Parabolic and Hyperbolic Equations

This tutorial provides an overview of the generalized Lyapunov method (GLM) for analyzing input-to-state stability (ISS) of partial differential equations (PDEs). We begin by revisiting the classical Lyapunov method and the standard ISS-Lyapunov theorem, highlighting their limitations when applied to systems with complex boundary disturbances. In contrast, the GLM, based on the concept of generalized Lyapunov functionals (GLFs) that explicitly depend on the external input, offers greater flexibility and efficiency, particularly for PDEs with Dirichlet-type disturbances. The main objective of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to systematically construct GLFs to establish ISS estimates in $L^q$ spaces with any $q\in[2,\infty]$ for different PDEs. Specifically, we consider three representative classes of PDEs: (i) an $N$-dimensional nonlinear parabolic equation with mixed nonlinear boundary disturbances, (ii) a first order nonlinear hyperbolic equation with boundary disturbances, and (iii) a second order linear hyperbolic equation, i.e., a wave equation, with boundary damping and disturbances. For each case, we provide step-by-step constructions of appropriate GLFs and derive explicit ISS estimates, illustrating the general applicability of the GLM. Finally, we discuss open challenges and future directions, including the systematic construction of GLFs for broader classes of PDEs and their applications in controller design.
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Signal Processing · Cross-listed from cs.RO

Terrain Perception for Agricultural UAVs in Complex Farmland via Rotating mmWave Radar

Accurate terrain perception is essential for terrain-following flight of agricultural unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), yet remains challenging in real-world farmland due to occlusions, complex terrain geometry, and environmental disturbances. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar is a promising sensing modality for this task due to its robustness to adverse conditions; however, existing UAV-mounted radar systems rely on fixed field of view (FoV) and terrain extraction methods designed for dense LiDAR data, leading to incomplete and unreliable terrain estimation. To address these limitations, we present a low-cost rotating mmWave radar-enabled terrain perception framework for agricultural UAVs operating in complex farmland environments. Specifically, a mechanically rotating sensing design is introduced to enlarge spatial coverage and improve terrain observability beyond the limitations of fixed-view radar under dynamic low-altitude flight. Building upon this sensing capability, we further design a pose-consistent terrain reconstruction pipeline tailored for sparse, noisy, and partially observable radar data, enabling reliable ground extraction and continuous terrain surface estimation in challenging agricultural scenarios. The complete system is deployed on a real agricultural UAV platform and comprehensively evaluated through extensive field experiments. Experimental results demonstrate improved terrain coverage and estimation accuracy, achieving an F1 score of 94.42 for ground segmentation, while the closest rival only achieves 90.48. Thus, leading to more robust terrain following flight.
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All authors Zhihao Zhan, Le Tao, Shaobin Li, Chenxin Fang, Xingrui Yang, Liang Li, Rui Fan, Yuhang Ming