Papers

Robotic systems are vulnerable to False Data Injection Attacks (FDIAs), where adversaries corrupt sensor signals to gain malicious control. Feedback linearization exposes robotic systems to integrator vulnerability, making them susceptible to stealthy attacks that can cause significant deviations in end-effector behavior without raising alarms. This paper addresses the resilience of manipulators against finite-horizon FDIAs by formalizing two defense methods, namely anomaly-aware virtual damping and manipulability reduction, with probabilistic guarantees on nominal task execution. Simulations on a 7-DOF redundant manipulator show that the proposed defenses substantially reduce the impact of FDIA compared to using solely a threshold-based ADS like the Chi-squared, while preserving nominal task performance in the absence of attack.

Seamlessly unifying communication and sensing, sixth-generation (6G) networks are poised to transform into intelligent platforms with high spectral-energy efficiency and real-time environmental awareness. In the low-altitude economy, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) enable air-ground integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) for applications such as logistics and inspection, yet most studies focus on single-UAV or homogeneous-agent designs. In contrast, this paper proposes a multi-UAV cooperative ISAC system that enables heterogeneous-agent collaboration between multiple UAVs and a ground base station (BS) for joint target sensing, tracking, and communication. The system is formulated as a posterior Cramer-Rao bound (PCRB) minimization problem under communication performance constraints, utilizing joint trajectory-beamforming optimization. To tackle the NP-hard nature of this problem, we design a curriculum-based heterogeneous-agent proximal policy optimization (C-HAPPO) algorithm, where curriculum learning guides progressive policy refinement and Kronecker/QR decomposition mitigates action dimensionality. Simulation results show that the proposed approach achieves more than a 30% improvement in sensing performance, faster convergence, and higher tracking accuracy than existing baselines, demonstrating its scalability and effectiveness for complex multi-UAV ISAC scenarios.

Low-light image enhancement remains a challenging problem due to severe noise, color distortion, contrast degradation, and loss of structural details under insufficient illumination. Existing methods typically apply uniform enhancement without considering the depth-dependent nature of light attenuation and sensor noise in real-world scenes. To address this limitation, we propose LUMEN, a multi-stage enhancement framework that integrates virtual flash simulation with transformer-based feature fusion. The proposed framework first estimates scene depth from low-light inputs using a dedicated encoder-decoder network, after which a soft clustering module partitions pixels into depth-aware regions, enabling depth-dependent flash simulation. The simulated flash features, together with depth representations, are fused with image features through efficient attention-based fusion blocks to enhance global context while preserving fine details. A composite loss function combining reconstruction, perceptual, structural, color, edge, and depth consistency objectives ensures both visual fidelity and perceptual quality. Extensive experiments on LOL-v1 and LOL-v2 benchmarks demonstrate that LUMEN achieves state-of-the-art performance and produces visually natural results compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

This tutorial presents cooperative and noncooperative game-theoretic frameworks for modeling, learning, and control in socio-technical systems, where human behavior, incentives, institutions, and social interactions are coupled with cyber-physical and networked infrastructures. The paper reviews strategic, dynamic, cooperative, matching, learning, and feedback-control approaches for analyzing how local decision-making, adaptation, and strategic interactions shape collective system outcomes. The tutorial further develops feedback-learning and incentive-design perspectives that connect equilibrium analysis with adaptation, distributed control, and mechanism design under information and coordination constraints. We also examine resilience and security challenges arising from adversarial behavior, misinformation, disruptions, and cascading failures in interconnected socio-technical networks. Finally, we discuss emerging research directions at the intersection of game theory, control, learning, and network science for resilient and adaptive socio-technical systems.

Despite 230 million speakers, Urdu remains critically under-resourced in speech technology. We introduce UrduSpeech: a large high-fidelity Urdu corpus comprising 156 hours of audio with 12-dimension paralinguistic metadata, encompassing US-Std, US-CS, US-EngPk. To address Right-to-Left script constraints and frequent code-switching, we developed UrduSpeech, a LLM-driven pipeline to curate data across 12 diverse categories, including news, drama, and rare literary forms like Bait-Bazi. We also release a 9-hour US-Benchmark set, manually corrected by native annotators to serve as a standard. Human quality assessment of the primary 156-hour corpus yielded a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.6 (std = 0.7) with inter-rater reliability confirmed by a 0.68 Cohen's Kappa, validating our curation pipeline's 97.6% confidence score. The corpus maintains a 60-40 gender balance across 71,792 utterances. Our work represents a significant leap toward linguistic inclusivity in global AI. The corpus and code are open-sourced, and a demo page is available.

Generative models have demonstrated remarkable potential in time series analysis tasks, like synthesis, forecasting, imputation, etc. However, offering limited coverage for generative models, existing time series libraries are mainly engineered for discriminative models, with standardized workflows for specific tasks, such as optimizing Mean Squared Errors for time series forecasting. This rigid structure is fundamentally incompatible with the distinct and often complex paradigms of generative models (e.g., adversarial training, diffusion processes), which learn the underlying data distribution rather than a direct input-output mapping. To this end, we proposed GenTS, a comprehensive and extensible benchmark library designed for systematic assessment on generative time series models. GenTS features a unified data preprocessing pipeline, a collection of versatile models, and panoramic evaluation metrics. Its modular design also enables the researchers to flexibly customize beyond our built-in datasets and models. Based on GenTS, we conducted benchmarking experiments under diverse tasks, accordingly offering suggestions for model selection and identifying potential directions for future research. Our codes are open-source at https://github.com/WillWang1113/GenTS. The official tutorials and document are available at https://willwang1113.github.io/GenTS/.

Wireless resource allocation in digital-twin-enabled unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms must be both network-feasible and certifiably safe for closed-loop control. Existing packet-level or scalar-priority schedulers cannot meaningfully compare heterogeneous multi-hop actions that differ simultaneously in route, retransmission depth, blocklength, bidirectional delay, delivery probability, and TDMA slot cost. This paper introduces a certificate-guided resource allocation framework for low-altitude multi-hop UAV swarms. A digital twin maps predicted topology, channel, route, and controller-side state into a shared five-dimensional quality-of-service (QoS) certificate comprising uplink/downlink delay bounds, directional delivery guarantees, and a certified upper bound on the interval between successful bidirectional interactions. A state-conditioned stochastic drift test then admits only certificates whose augmented Lyapunov drift is nonpositive under the current controller state. Admitted actions are reduced to certified supply frontiers by removing dominated route-slot configurations, and the online scheduler maximizes Lyapunov-drift reduction under a shared TDMA slot budget via exact dynamic programming. Closed-loop ns-3 simulations demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms fixed-service, certificate-filtered fixed-priority, dynamic-transmission-count, and value-of-information baselines in both tracking accuracy and high-risk state suppression under identical communication budgets.

This paper develops a first-order observation model for reference–background mismatch in single-snapshot frequency-diverse array multiple-input multiple-output ground-penetrating radar (FDA-MIMO-GPR) over complex media. The model separates the shared background residual from the local anomaly and maps it through a fixed-reference distorted Born approximation into the joint observation domain. The formulation distinguishes the physical residual source from its organization by FDA frequency states and transmit–frequency assignments. Closed-form residual moments are transferred to fixed linear task domains, yielding task-risk and discrepancy relations together with a finite reference-screening criterion. Controlled Cole–Cole ensembles reveal nonzero off-event covariance and task-dependent pseudo-anomaly patterns. Finite full-wave simulations support the predicted covariance and mismatch-dependent discrepancy trends while delimiting the first-order validity domain. These results provide a compact framework for quantifying and screening reference-induced residuals in single-snapshot FDA-MIMO-GPR.

Residential batteries increasingly serve two roles: they can earn money by arbitraging wholesale prices and providing grid services, and they provide backup power during outages. This dual use creates a basic tradeoff between earning market value and preserving outage readiness. Coordination across many batteries can help, but a provider cannot treat the fleet as a single virtual battery when each household is promised its own backup protection. We compare standalone control, in which each home is dispatched independently, with pooling, in which homes are coordinated while each battery retains its own state of charge and household-specific backup requirement. Both regimes are implemented as model predictive control problems with 15-minute decision intervals and evaluated using household telemetry together with ERCOT market inputs. The empirical design focuses on the 543 homes in our sample that can support at least one backup product in standalone operation and studies backup caps ranging from 2 to 24 hours. Lower caps relax backup obligations, while the 24-hour cap coincides with assigning each home its own longest feasible backup tier. Pooling remains beneficial in this service-constrained setting, but its value declines smoothly as backup obligations tighten. Standalone firm margin ranges from \$11.06 per home per week at the 2-hour cap to \$10.79 at the 24-hour cap, while pooling benefit falls from \$1.49 to \$1.27 per home per week. Relative to standalone firm margin, pooling is worth about 13.5% at the 2-hour cap and about 11.8% at the 24-hour cap. Coordination therefore still helps after preserving household-level backup guarantees, but its value declines as backup obligations tighten.

We address the conditions and design of controllers and observers for homogeneous networks of linear MIMO agents. We develop networked controllers and observers that ensure the stability of both the system state and the estimation error, leveraging the concept of generalized frequency variables. A separation principle for networks is then established, showing that the observer and controller can be designed independently and combined to achieve a stable output feedback. Our results are illustrated via a highly unstable, oscillatory network of locally actuated pendulums on carts. Finally, necessary conditions for controllability and observability – derived from agent properties and network structure – are established and discussed.

Although modern multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems support several Nigerian languages, their performance consistently lags behind resource-rich languages such as English and French. Nigerian languages present unique modelling hurdles, including acute data scarcity, inconsistent orthography, tonal diacritics, diverse accents, frequent code-switching, and localised named entities. To address these challenges, we developed a multilingual ASR framework using a two-stage distillation process. First, we employed student-teacher knowledge distillation from existing monolingual models, conditioned on robust language-specific N-gram language models. Second, we performed iterative self improvement using pseudo-labelled data to further refine accuracy. Our method significantly bridges the performance gap, achieving on average a reduction in the relative Word Error Rate (WER) of 29% over the monolingual baselines. Our models also outperform state-of-the-art multilingual models across major benchmarks, including Common Voice and FLEURS. We introduce Sometin Beta Pass Notin (SBPN), a multilingual foundational ASR model that covers Yorùbá, Hausa, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin, and Nigerian English.

Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting identifies wire-less transmitters using hardware-induced imperfections present in baseband I/Q signals. However, deep learning models often degrade under receiver and channel distribution shifts, particularly as transmitter populations grow. This work proposes the Hamiltonian Transformer, a physics-informed attention architecture that enforces norm preserving value dynamics within each attention head using a learned skew-symmetric generator and a Störmer-Verlet leapfrog integration step. An additional phase-increment embedding exposes oscillator dynamics at the input layer. All experiments use non-equalized raw I/Q signals from the WiSig dataset under four protocols: same-day classification, cross-receiver generalisation, cross-day generalisation, and transmitter scaling up to 150 devices. The Hamiltonian Transformer achieves 99.12% accuracy under same-day conditions and 61.64% at 150 transmitters, consistently outperforming CNN and Transformer baselines across all scale points. A controlled ablation study identifies norm-preservation in the value update as the primary inductive bias driving the scaling advantage, with the phase increment embedding providing the single largest per-component improvement. These results indicate that embedding physics-informed structural priors into attention mechanisms is an effective approach to large-scale transmitter identification on raw wireless signals.

Photoplethysmography (PPG) has become a ubiquitous physiological signal; however, current generative models still struggle to preserve realistic waveform morphology and learn a latent structure that captures cardiac and respiratory physiology. PPG generators trained with adversarial losses can produce plausible waveforms, but provide no inference path from a real signal to a latent representation. Variational autoencoders, on the other hand, map the PPG data to latent codes, although their decoders often blur systolic upstrokes and dampen amplitude and spectral details. Diffusion models improve waveform fidelity, but typically lack an inference path for reconstruction and physiological analysis. We propose VampPrior Latent Diffusion (VAMP-Diff), a jointly trained variational diffusion model that combines a temporal PPG encoder, a conditional one-dimensional diffusion decoder, and VampPrior regularization on a compact pooled latent. The model uses full temporal latent during diffusion reconstruction, giving the decoder access to beat timing and morphology while generating samples from learned VampPrior components instead of a fixed Gaussian prior. We demonstrate on the CapnoBase dataset that VAMP-Diff produces realistic PPG signals, reconstructs sharper physiological waveforms than Gaussian-prior baselines, preserves heart-rate information, maintains respiratory-rate consistency, and is sensitive to waveform corruptions through reconstruction error.

Any system that models the world under finite representational capacity must compress; any compression entails a prior; and the prior is the system's bias. What has not been established is whether uncertainty participates in the dynamics governing future behavior, or merely describes the output distribution without consequence. We introduce a structural distinction between descriptive uncertainty, which does not recursively modulate the system's policy, and regulatory uncertainty, which directly enters the optimization landscape and drives persistent adaptive restructuring. We prove formally that current transformer architectures are confined to descriptive uncertainty at inference. We ground this in thermodynamics via Landauer's principle: for uncertainty to be regulatory, epistemic error must cost real energy; in a decoupled system, hallucinations and correct derivations dissipate identical energy. We test this empirically across three locally-deployed language models (3B, 8B, 70B parameters). Token-level Shannon entropy is statistically invariant across tasks spanning pattern retrieval, causal operator application, and out-of-distribution causal generalization in all three models (all pairwise p >= 0.568; within-model ranges 0.011-0.028 nats), while task accuracy varies substantially across the same conditions (0%-100%). Entropy and accuracy are orthogonal. The decoupling is scale-invariant: larger models achieve higher accuracy but identical entropy flatness. This structural incapacity is not resolvable by additional parameters or training data. Genuine epistemic grounding requires physical coupling between thermodynamic substrate state and information processing cost.

Intracranial EEG (iEEG) provides high-fidelity neural recordings essential for clinical and brain-computer interface applications, but acquiring these signals requires invasive surgery. While recent studies have attempted to estimate iEEG from non-invasive scalp EEG, most rely on patient-specific models, creating a circular dependency: if surgery is required to collect training data, the non-invasive model offers limited practical benefit. In this study, we address the challenge of cross-subject iEEG reconstruction by predicting intracranial signals for unseen patients using models trained on other individuals. We propose CAST (Cross-Attention Spatial-Temporal Transformer), a machine learning framework that translates scalp EEG into multi-channel iEEG waveforms through a two-stage transfer learning strategy. First, a temporal encoder extracts multi-scale neural representations at three different resolutions. Then, because electrode placements vary substantially across patients, a channel-aware decoder is calibrated using only a few minutes of data from the target subject. We evaluated the proposed method using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation on two public datasets comprising 1,282 iEEG channels. Experimental results demonstrate that CAST reconstructs cortical signals located near the scalp surface substantially better than deep subcortical activity. In highly observable sensorimotor regions, the model achieved peak correlations of up to r=0.864 in the precentral gyrus. Furthermore, with a channel selection strategy, CAST obtained a mean correlation of r=0.545 on viable subjects, outperforming previous within-subject baselines. These findings indicate that cortical iEEG signals can be reconstructed for unseen subjects from scalp EEG without extensive patient-specific training, and that only a brief calibration phase is sufficient to adapt the model to new hardware configurations.

Edge inference systems are typically evaluated with software-reported latency collected under controlled conditions. We argue, and demonstrate empirically, that deployment interference can corrupt not only the inference timing being measured but the timing observability infrastructure that measures it, and that the two failures can occur independently. We pair software-reported timing with externally observable GPIO intervals captured by a Saleae Logic Pro 8 logic analyzer on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, running MobileNetV2 under two inference architectures (TensorRT FP16 GPU and ONNX Runtime CPU) across baseline, light memory pressure, and storage writeback stress. Across 35 paired capture runs (3500 samples) plus 3 storage-stress runs where external pairing failed (300 software-only samples), we observe three findings the software-only view does not surface. (1) The two architectures differ not only in mean latency but in distributional structure: TensorRT baseline clusters tightly near 1.23 ms (run-mean SD 15 us) while ORT CPU baseline is multimodal with run-mean SD 31.8 ms. (2) Light memory pressure inflates TensorRT P99 from 1.28 ms to 1.61 ms, while one of five ORT memory-stress runs collapses into a deterministic 198 ms regime rather than uniformly inflating variance. (3) All three TensorRT storage-stress runs produce complete software timing logs (100/100 iterations) alongside externally observable timing failures of three different kinds (full post-marker collapse, ~40% transition loss, and complete acquisition failure) – while the runtime reports normal completion in every case. We claim, narrowly, that timing observability is itself an interference-sensitive resource, and that summary statistics from a single timing source can hide failure modes an independent external observer makes visible.

This work establishes a framework of near-field communication under different array geometries of extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO). We first formulate the near-field spatial non-stationary channel model which is characterized by the distance between the user and each antenna on uniform and modular curved arrays. By fixing the total number of antennas while varying the degree of curvature, we investigate a fair case where the horizontal arc length of the curved array is the same as the planar array. We explicitly unveil the non-trivial impact of array curvature on extending the near-field region for cell edges. Then, for arbitrary array geometries and arbitrary-field channels, we estimate the spatial-domain channel by tackling a compressed sensing problem with a learned regularizer. Without relying on specific codebooks, we propose a denoising autoencoder (AE)-aided approximated message passing (AMP) algorithm and provide the corresponding theoretical replica bound. Finally, based on the estimated channel, we propose an optimization algorithm to maximize the sum user rate for sub-connected XL-MIMO systems by jointly designing the array geometry and hybrid precoding in the downlink. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed AE-AMP algorithm can effectively estimate the spatial non-stationary near-field channels with robustness and generalities compared to several conventional and deep-learning-based benchmarks. The improvement of data rate by using modular curved arrays with the estimated channel is also validated.

Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based biometric recognition has emerged as a promising solution for secure authentication and liveness detection. However, most existing methods rely on unimodal deep learning architectures that independently process either one-dimensional (1D) temporal signals or two-dimensional (2D) time-frequency representations, limiting robustness and generalization. To address this issue, this paper proposes a hybrid framework integrating 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) within a unified end-to-end architecture. The 1D branch extracts temporal and morphological features from raw ECG signals, while the 2D branch captures discriminative spectral information from time-frequency representations. An attention-guided fusion mechanism dynamically weights both modalities according to input characteristics, overcoming the limitations of conventional static fusion strategies. The framework was evaluated on three benchmark datasets (ECG-ID, MIT-BIH, and PTB), including healthy subjects and patients with cardiac pathologies, achieving identification accuracies of 99.56%, 100.00%, and 99.89%, respectively. To assess long-term biometric permanence, experiments were also conducted on the multi-session Heartprint dataset spanning ten years. The proposed approach achieved same-session accuracies of 98.54% (S1), 99.09% (S2), 94.93% (S3R), and 96.08% (S3L), while cross-session evaluations reached 56.33% (S1-S2) and 53.27% (S2-S3R), demonstrating the ability to capture stable biometric signatures over time. The optimal configuration combines InceptionTime for 1D processing, ResNet-34 for 2D analysis, and attention-based fusion. Ablation studies confirm that the proposed attention mechanism consistently outperforms conventional fusion approaches. Overall, the proposed framework provides a robust, scalable, and high-performance solution for ECG biometric recognition.

Distributed controller synthesis offers scalable and privacy-preserving control design, but typical state-of-the-art approaches either assume white-box models or resort to centralized synthesis. In this paper, we combine partially known model knowledge and an input-state dataset within a distributed gray-box scheme to design \(\mathcal{H}_2\) controllers. Our method can handle unknown dynamics and offers scalable synthesis. Each agent communicates with a set of neighbors determined by the physical coupling topology of the system such that we can apply the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) to solve the problem iteratively in a fully distributed fashion (i.e., without a central server). The effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated in simulations of the IEEE 39-bus power system test case.

This letter investigates the problem of output synchronisation in heterogeneous dynamical networks with nonlinear diffusive couplings in the presence of disturbances on the coupling links. By exploiting relative dissipativity properties between adjacent agents, distributed conditions are established to guarantee output synchronisation. Specifically, these conditions can be verified using only local information associated with neighbouring agents and coupling links. As an illustration, a heterogeneous network of Goodwin oscillators is considered, where the relative dissipativity properties between neighbouring oscillators are characterised and used to analyse synchronisation.

This letter proposes a distributed 3D leader-follower formation (3D-LFF) control framework for multi-UAV systems that achieves formation tracking while enforcing perception safety constraints. Maintaining safe, vision-based 3D-LFF is challenging because onboard cameras impose strict Field-of-View (FOV) limitations, and demanding formation commands can drive the leader outside the follower's camera frustum, resulting in loss of visibility. To address this issue, we develop a perception-aware safe control architecture that guarantees visibility by construction. First, we derive a relative kinematic model in a line-of-sight coordinate representation and design a distributed 3D-LFF tracking controller using only locally available relative states. Next, we embed the nominal formation controller within a Control Barrier Function-based Quadratic Program (CBF-QP) safety filter that minimally modifies the commanded velocities to maintain the leader inside the follower's camera frustum while preserving formation tracking whenever feasible. Gazebo simulations and Crazyflie hardware experiments validate the proposed approach, demonstrating accurate formation tracking and effective FOV enforcement, including scenarios in which the nominal desired formation conflicts with visibility constraints.

We experimentally evaluated the sensing-communication trade-off from the fixed-point precision MIMO equalizer using FPGA. At 7-bit, noise floor drops 100x and angular error 63%, but the communication performance saturates while the hardware complexity rises.

Weakly labeled datasets such as AudioSet have driven recent progress in audio tagging. However, annotation quality varies across sound classes. Labels may be incomplete, ambiguous, or unreliable, which introduces class-dependent supervision bias during optimisation. The issue becomes harder as real and generated audio are increasingly mixed in training, and generated samples do not always match their intended semantic labels. Prior work mainly addressed unreliable supervision from missing-positive labels, while this paper targets three other sources of unreliable supervision: spurious additions, misassignments between similar classes, and weakened label evidence. These effects introduce class-dependent optimisation bias that is not explicitly modeled by most existing methods. To bridge this gap, the paper proposes a Class-wise Supervision Unreliability (CSU) framework that controls supervision strength at the class level during training. CSU learns a separate unreliability parameter for each class and down-weights less reliable supervision without changing the model architecture or inference process. To support evaluations, this paper also introduces ESC-FreeGen50, a manually verified benchmark of 50 sound classes that combines real and generated audio. Experiments on controlled benchmarks and AudioSet show that CSU improves robustness across different architectures and different sources of supervision unreliability. The results indicate that explicit class-wise modeling of supervision unreliability is an effective and practical strategy for robust audio tagging under large-scale weakly labeled training. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Yuanbo2020/CSU

Finding sound effects or environmental sounds that match a creator's intended impression remains a largely manual process in multimedia production. This is especially relevant for comics and other visual media, where visually stylized onomatopoeic expressions convey auditory impressions through letter shapes, strokes, layouts, and decorative patterns. However, cross-modal retrieval between onomatopoeic images and general sounds has been largely unexplored. This paper thus introduces a bidirectional retrieval framework between onomatopoeic images and the corresponding sound clips. Instead of directly comparing embeddings extracted from pretrained image and audio encoder, we train modality-specific projection heads that re-align the embeddings for visual onomatopoeia and corresponding sounds. We then construct the Multimodal Image-Audio Onomatopoeia dataset (MIAO), which contains paired onomatopoeic images and sound clips across 50 sound event classes. Experimental results show that the proposed method substantially outperforms a zero-shot baseline using pretrained CLIP and CLAP embeddings. These results demonstrate that adapting pretrained representations enables effective retrieval in both directions: from onomatopoeic images to sounds and from sounds to onomatopoeic images.

Image super-resolution (SR) aims to reconstruct high-quality, high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs and plays a critical role in various downstream applications. Despite recent advancements, balancing reconstruction fidelity and computational efficiency remains a fundamental challenge, particularly in resource-constrained scenarios. While existing lightweight methods attempt to expand receptive fields, many of them either incur substantial computational overhead, naively scale up kernel sizes, or lack mechanisms for coherent multi-scale integration, limiting their overall effectiveness and scalability. To address these limitations, we propose EchoSR, an efficient context-harnessing framework for lightweight image super-resolution, which unifies multi-scale receptive field modeling and hierarchical context fusion. EchoSR decouples feature learning into disentangled local, multi-scale, and global modeling stages through an efficient context-harnessing strategy, and further promotes seamless cross-scale integration via a cross-scale overlapping fusion mechanism. Extensive experiments have shown that EchoSR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight super-resolution methods across multiple benchmarks, while also achieving a faster speed $(\sim 2\times)$. The source code is available at https://github.com/funnyWang-Echoes/EchoSR.

We analyze how automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors propagate through ASR–LLM cascades in Korean spoken question answering (SQA), focusing on downstream semantic failures that conventional ASR metrics cannot fully capture. Our analysis shows that the relative downstream degradation caused by ASR errors is consistent across LLMs with different absolute performance, suggesting that cascade degradation largely tracks ASR-stage information loss. We further identify single-character ASR errors as a particularly salient source of information loss in Korean, where even a minimal transcription difference can change the intended question and degrade downstream QA performance. Finally, an auxiliary comparison shows that a large audio language model outperforms an ASR–LLM cascade with an approximately matched language backbone in noisy Korean SQA, indicating the potential of direct audio input to mitigate transcript-induced information loss.

High-fidelity text-to-music generation typically relies on massive proprietary datasets and immense computational resources. Existing models often struggle to generate coherent pure musical accompaniments and lack precise, localized semantic control due to their reliance on coarse, track-level annotations. To address these limitations under constrained data and computing resources, we propose S2Accompanist, a Semantic-Aware and Structure-Guided Diffusion Model developed for the ICME2026 ATTM Grand Challenge. Specifically, we design an automated data pipeline comprising structural segmentation, Large Audio-Language Model driven segment-level captioning, and dual-metric quality grading to overcome the absence of localized metadata in raw datasets. Furthermore, we propose a semantic-aware Variational Autoencoder fine-tuning strategy that explicitly distills foundational LeadSheet structures into the acoustic latent space, effectively improving the overall audio fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S2Accompanist achieves state-of-the-art objective performance on the ATTM Grand Challenge benchmark across both the Efficiency and Performance Tracks. With only 402M parameters, our model remains competitive compared to larger-scale unconstrained models and secured first place in the Efficiency Track.

Spatially selective active noise control (SSANC) hearables aim to attenuate noise from certain directions at the eardrum while preserving desired speech arriving from selected directions. Existing SSANC systems typically assume an accurate estimate of the secondary path from the loudspeaker to the inner error microphone. In practice, however, this path varies across users and device fits, which can degrade performance and compromise system stability. This paper proposes a robust soft-constrained optimization framework that computes a single control filter by minimizing the average cost over a set of secondary-path estimates derived from human measurements. Simulations show that the proposed approach achieves slightly lower mean performance than the matched case but substantially narrows the performance spread under secondary-path mismatch. Real-time experiments using the tested head-and-torso simulator show good agreement with the simulations.

We introduce UPSim (UxNB Propagation Simulator), an open-source, Ray Tracing-calibrated solution for spatially consistent FR3 (16.95 GHz) air-to-ground propagation modeling in Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) networks. Instead of executing point-to-point ray launches for every ground position, UPSim derives deterministic visibility regions directly from global 3D building geometry (3D-GloBFP) via fast shadow projection. It then augments these regions with Line-of-Sight (LOS) state-specific, UAV height- and distance-dependent path loss, spatially correlated large-scale fading, and log-logistic small-scale fading parameterized by over 136 million Ray Tracing (RT) channels. Validation against reference RT data demonstrates that UPSim accurately reproduces empirical attenuation maps, outperforming the 3GPP baseline by reducing the aggregate Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance from 0.33 to 0.04. The resulting maps enable route-based analysis of channel evolution in complex urban layouts, capturing critical trajectory-level metrics such as spatial outage persistence. Consequently, UPSim provides a highly scalable, open-source middle ground between computationally expensive full RT and purely stochastic models for mobility-aware 6G aerial network planning.

High-density LED arrays enable high-speed transmission in image-sensor-based visible-light communication (VLC) systems. However, when optical spots become blurred and spatially overlapped due to focal shift, resolution limitations, or interference, severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) occurs, significantly degrading decoding performance. Furthermore, radial distortion introduces geometric deformation of the LED grid, while vignetting leads to incomplete and asymmetric spot shapes at the periphery, both of which further hinder reliable signal detection. Existing methods mitigate ISI by reducing LED transmission signaling density. This paper proposes a robust decoding framework that maintains full LED signaling density. We introduce a pilot-aided geometric recognition method that uses a PSF-constrained Hough transform and circle-center alignment refinement. In addition, radial distortion correction and vignetting-aware compensation are incorporated to restore geometric consistency and suppress edge-related detection errors. By leveraging prior structural knowledge from pilot frames, the system effectively separates overlapping LED signals under severe optical distortion. Experimental results on a real-world VLC testbed confirm that the proposed method achieves superior decoding accuracy and throughput compared to conventional Hough-based and low-density baseline methods. The results highlight its potential for high-efficiency VLC applications in interference-prone environments.