Systems and Control
Ramping Procurement and Bid-Cost Recovery in Real-Time Market
Cong Chen, Valentina Norambuena and Lang Tong
We study ramping procurement co-optimized with economic dispatch under net-demand uncertainty. We examine two flexible ramp product designs implemented by grid operators: single-interval and multi-interval co-optimization. Both rely on rolling-window
stochastic optimization with binding and advisory interval decisions. We develop analytical frameworks to evaluate generator profits, consumer payments, bid cost recovery (BCR), and operational efficiency. In particular, net-demand uncertainty may lead to generator under-compensation, requiring discriminatory BCR. While operational efficiency is invariant to energy and ramp prices, producer profits and consumer payments depend critically on pricing. We examine locational marginal pricing (LMP) and two uniform pricing: maximum dispatch cost pricing (MDCP) and maximum temporal locational marginal pricing (MTLMP). With out-of-
market BCR, LMP yields discriminatory energy prices, whereas MDCP eliminates BCR and MTLMP does so in most cases. This property enables us to establish truthful bidding incentives for price-taking generators under MDCP. Our analysis highlights trade-offs between single- and multi-interval co-optimization and pricing designs: single-interval energy-ramp co-optimization is advantageous under high forecast uncertainty and moderate ramping requirements, whereas multi-interval co-optimization is superior when net-demand forecasts are relatively accurate and ramp needs are challenging. Empirical results on CAISO and ERCOT data show that MDCP and MTLMP increase producer profits with negligible BCR, albeit at the expense of higher consumer payments relative to LMP.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Safe, Real-Time Active Model Discrimination and Fault Diagnosis for Nonlinear Systems via Differentiable Reachability
Xinpei Ni, Melkior Ornik, Glen Chou et al. (+1 more)
We present a safe, real-time
algorithm for active fault diagnosis and model discrimination for uncertain continuous-time nonlinear systems with process and measurement disturbances. Given a finite set of candidate models representing nominal and faulty modes, including actuator and sensor faults, we formulate an output-feedback, time-varying policy optimization problem that (i) robustly enforces state-input safety constraints over a finite horizon and (ii) drives the system to produce sampled measurements consistent with at most one model, enabling deterministic diagnosis. To solve this problem in real time, we develop a tractable approximation using interval over-approximations of reachable state and output sets, and encode diagnosability via a differentiable objective that penalizes overlap between the reachable output sets of possible models. The resulting optimization is solved efficiently online with gradient-based methods using JAX and differentiable reachability primitives. We evaluate our method on sensor and actuator fault diagnosis (up to 11 fault modes) in several high-dimensional nonlinear robotic systems, including a simulated quadrotor and fighter-jet model, a hardware differential-drive
robot, and quadrupedal
navigation. Across these case studies, our approach achieves reliable model discrimination in under 50 ms, outperforming baselines in discrimination success rate and speed while providing formal safety guarantees.
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All authors Xinpei Ni, Melkior Ornik, Glen Chou, Samuel Coogan
Image and Video Processing
FrequencyFormer: A Co-Designed Sensor-to-Processor Pipeline for Frequency-Domain Vision Transformer Inference
Chengwei Zhou, Ovishake Sen, Xuming Chen et al. (+5 more)
Deploying
vision transformers (ViTs) on sensor-edge systems is limited not only by on-device compute, but also by the energy and bandwidth required to transmit high-dimensional image data from the sensor to the processor. While in-sensor and near-sensor computing reduce this cost through early feature extraction, existing methods often provide only modest compression. We observe that the frequency domain provides a naturally compact representation of visual information and can be exploited at the sensor level to reduce sensor-to-processor data movement. Building on this insight, we present FrequencyFormer, a co-designed sensor-to-processor pipeline for efficient ViT inference. FrequencyFormer includes: (1) a multi-scale DCT tokenizer that compresses a 224x224 image into compact frequency-domain
tokens, achieving up to 128x reduction in off-chip data volume with modest accuracy loss; (2) a LUT-based near-sensor hardware implementation that leverages fixed DCT coefficients for multiplier-free, energy- and area-efficient tokenization; and (3) a modified MIPI-based low-power communication architecture that further reduces transfer energy. FrequencyFormer serves as a drop-in replacement for standard ViT patch
embedding and remains compatible with pretrained backbones across classification, detection, and
segmentation tasks. The pipeline achieves 28.8 TOPS/W, reduces communication energy by 230x, and lowers total sensor-side energy by 2.22x, demonstrating frequency-domain tokenization as a scalable foundation for in-sensor ViT deployment.
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All authors Chengwei Zhou, Ovishake Sen, Xuming Chen, Rishith Paramasivam, Shaahin Angizi, Swarup Bhunia, Baibhab Chatterjee, Gourav Datta
Systems and Control
GDGU: A Gradient Difference-based Graph Unlearning Method for Cyberattack Localization in Electric Vehicle Charging Networks
Nanhong Liu, Mucun Sun and Jie Zhang
Electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) can expose distribution feeders to cyberattacks. While machine learning methods, including graph neural networks, can localize which bus is compromised, significant challenges remain in data sharing and model training. For example,
privacy regulations grant EVCS owners the right to delete their training data from a deployed model, yet retraining from scratch on every request is computationally prohibitive. To address this, we study graph unlearning (GU) for EVCS cyberattack localization, formulated as a feature-level unlearning problem on a graph-level multi-label classification task. Specifically, we propose gradient difference-based graph unlearning (GDGU), which removes the influence of the requested deletion data through a first-order parameter correction. The correction is computed from the gradient difference between the original training data and a modified
dataset in which only the charging power features at the requested EVCS buses are unlearned. Then, a batch-normalization recalibration and a brief recovery fine-tuning step are applied to restore localization utility. We
benchmark GDGU against two second-order GU baselines on the IEEE 34-bus, 123-bus, and 8500-node distribution networks across three graph neural network backbones and cumulative unlearning scenarios. GDGU matches the strongest baseline on localization utility and reaches forgetting fidelity close to full-retraining, while unlearning 10 to 12 times faster than retraining from scratch and using far less
memory than the second-order GU baselines.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
pdSTL: Probabilistic Differentiable Signal Temporal Logic for Stochastic Systems
Bennett Dogbey and Hemanth Manjunatha
Autonomous
robots operating in uncertain environments must satisfy complex temporal and safety specifications despite
stochastic dynamics and sensing noise. While Signal Temporal Logic (STL) offers robustness measures for gradient-based optimization, existing extensions either lack differentiability or ignore belief-space uncertainty. We introduce pdSTL (probabilistic differentiable Signal Temporal Logic), a framework that unifies probabilistic semantics with differentiable robustness over belief trajectories. pdSTL employs interval-valued probabilistic semantics to compute conservative satisfaction bounds, propagated compositionally through the STL syntax tree. We formulate the temporal robustness evaluation as a recurrent, LSTM-style unfolding of STL operators, enabling linear-time, differentiable monitoring suitable for end-to-end trajectory optimization. We validate pdSTL on simulated obstacle avoidance, lane-change maneuvers, and real-world Crazyflie quadcopter flight experiments under aerodynamic disturbances. Results demonstrate that pdSTL achieves efficient optimization with formal probabilistic guarantees, significantly outperforming deterministic differentiable STL in maintaining safety margins under real-world uncertainty.
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Signal Processing
Multistatic J-Band Radar TX/RX Chipset in SiGe BiCMOS with Integrated x16 Frequency Multiplier Chain and High EIRP
Stephan Hauptmeier, Kennet Braasch, Till Ziegler-Bellenberg et al. (+4 more)
This work presents the design and measurement of a multistatic J-band radar chipset comprising a transmitter and a receiver MMIC both featuring an integrated $times$16 frequency multiplier chain for low-frequency local-oscillator distribution and scalable radar configurations. Multistatic radar architectures can sustain high transmission power and high receiver sensitivity simultaneously an advantage that is fully leveraged in the present chipset. To this end a four-way power-combining amplifier chain integrated on the transmitter MMIC delivers an output power of 11.2 dBm. The resulting measured EIRP is 41 dBm at 292 GHz with a collimating PTFE lens and 8.8 dBm without a lens. Despite the high frequency-multiplication factor an on-chip harmonic rejection better than 24 dBc was measured while a radiated in-band harmonic rejection of approximately 50 dBc was achieved through multiple filter stages. The receiver MMIC incorporates a three-stage low-noise amplifier and exhibits an overall conversion gain of 43.3 dB at 292 GHz. Integrated on-chip patch
antennas facilitate system integration and the use of highly directive dielectric lenses making the chipset suitable for long-range radar measurements which are demonstrated up to 150 m. The MMICs are realized in a 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology with an f_T and f_max of 500 GHz and 610 GHz respectively.
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All authors Stephan Hauptmeier, Kennet Braasch, Till Ziegler-Bellenberg, Diana P. Cortes N., Tobias T. Braun, Michael Höft, Nils Pohl
Systems and Control
ev-flow: A Reproducible, NHTS-Grounded Generator of Synthetic Plug-in Electric Vehicle Charging Behavior for Eight U.S. Regions
Bertrand Travacca
Electric-vehicle grid-integration studies need large, behaviorally realistic populations of individual charging profiles, but real charging telemetry is scarce and
privacy-restricted, and the existing open generators are calibrated to non-U.S. mobility surveys or flatten the regional, seasonal, and equipment heterogeneity that drives aggregate demand. We present ev-flow (import name pev\_synth), an open-source, MIT-licensed Python package that generates synthetic plug-in electric vehicle charging behavior for eight U.S. regions, grounded in 2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS) microdata and regional sales-mix models. A deterministic nine-stage pipeline (M1–M9) carries each vehicle from survey records to a time-stamped charging profile: it stitches survey person-days into donor-matched 365-day travel calendars with a temperature-dependent winter energy uplift, samples behavioral plug-in start times from the published
SPEECh K=16 Gaussian-mixture parameterization, evaluates a three-layer Bernoulli plug-in model, propagates a continuous-time state-of-charge ledger with an explicit PHEV gasoline range-extension term, and rasterizes plug status to 15-minute and hourly grids. The package generates residential and workplace profile types with descriptive EVSE brand and connector enrichment; every output is UTC-stored, timezone-aware, and bit-reproducible from a single master seed. A validation runner compares the generated distributions against published bounds and classifies every divergence with literature provenance: the reference bay\_area residential profile rolls up to 11 PASS, 0 unexplained FAIL, 6 explained failures, and 4 explained skips across 21 applicable checks. ev-flow fills a U.S.-focused, NHTS-grounded niche complementary to European generators such as emobpy and VencoPy and to charging simulators such as datafev and ACN-Sim.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Proprioceptive Invariant State Estimation for Humanoid Robots on Non-Inertial Ground
Falak Mandali, Zijian He and Yan Gu
This paper presents an invariant extended Kalman filtering (InEKF) approach for real-time state estimation of
humanoid robots operating on non-inertial ground using only onboard proprioceptive sensing. The proposed approach estimates the
robot's base position and velocity relative to the moving ground frame without requiring direct measurements of ground motion or externally mounted sensors. By exploiting kinematic constraints at the stance foot through foot-mounted IMUs, the filter accounts for ground-induced nonlinearities in the process and measurement models while remaining fully proprioceptive. The
estimator is formulated to admit a right-invariant measurement model, enabling favorable error dynamics under large initial uncertainties. Observability analysis establishes conditions under which the
robot's relative base position and velocity are observable with respect to the non-inertial ground frame. Experiments with the Digit
humanoid robot standing and squatting atop a swaying and pitching ground showcase a 96% speedup in convergence rate and an 80% reduction in position estimate errors over existing InEKFs. Walking experiments on a uni-axially rotating ground achieve an average estimation error of less than 9 cm for an initial error of up to 1 m.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Simulating Robotic Locomotion in Sand: Resistive Force Theory in an Open-Source Physics Engine
Ryan Walker Brown, Laura K. Treers and Kathryn A. Daltorio
Recent advancements in Resistive Force Theory (RFT) enable approximation of ground reaction forces for locomotion in sand without the computational expense of modeling interactions with individual grains. However, these tools have been absent in 3D physics engines commonly used for
robot simulation. We explore if resistive force approximations are sufficient, when integrated with standard dynamics calculations, to provide a stable substrate for a freely walking
robot. To determine this, we implement 3D Granular Resistive Force Theory (3D RFT) in a physics simulation engine, MuJoCo. We verify simulations in multiple scenarios to demonstrate that key trends due to end effector shape, speed, and loading are preserved. Our implementation predicts both walking distance and foot sinkage of a 12-Degree of Freedom hexapod
robot within 7% of experiments in sand. While RFT has inherent approximations, the open source tool described here has potential to help develop new and improved
robot designs to traverse granular media substrates.
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Audio and Speech Processing
A Survey of Full-Duplex Spoken Dialogue Systems: Architectural Hierarchy, Interaction Ontology, and Decision State Machine
Jingyu Lu, Yuhan Wang, Jianming Luo et al. (+15 more)
More than a dozen spoken dialogue systems have recently claimed to be "full-duplex," yet the term has been used to describe substantially different capabilities. Existing surveys collapse them onto a single axis (cascaded/end-to-end, or engineered/learned) and miss the distinctions that matter most for builders. We argue that much of this ambiguity is taxonomical: current terminology does not specify where duplex decisions are made, which interaction types are supported, or how a system behaves moment by moment. This paper introduces three complementary frameworks: (i) an L0-L3 Architectural Hierarchy that locates where duplex decisions are made; (ii) a $T\times I\times R$ Interaction Ontology that specifies the temporal relation, user intent, and required system response for each interaction; and (iii) a Decision State Machine (IDLE/LISTEN/SPEAK/WAIT/DUAL) that describes how systems move between states. Across published systems and
benchmarks, our audit documents a realization gap: although many architectures can in principle operate in full-duplex states, their observed behavior remains constrained by the interaction patterns represented in training and evaluation. We point to the limited public training-data coverage relative to the (largely undisclosed) industrial corpora, together with the still-unrealized goal of L3 representation-level modeling, as the key frontiers for future research on full-duplex dialogue. The related material is available at https://github.com/DuplexLM/DuplexSurvey.
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All authors Jingyu Lu, Yuhan Wang, Jianming Luo, Yifu Chen, Tianle Liang, Shengpeng Ji, Ziyue Jiang, Xiaoda Yang, Yu Zhang, Xize Cheng, Chenyuhao Wen, Changhao Pan, Haoxiao Wang, Chen Ye, Jian Wu, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang, Zhou Zhao
Audio and Speech Processing · Cross-listed from cs.SD
S-JEPA : Soft Clustering Anchors for Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning
Georgios Ioannides, Adrian Kieback, Judah Goldfeder et al. (+5 more)
Self-supervised
speech encoders are predominantly trained by predicting discrete hard cluster IDs at masked positions, a recipe that collapses acoustic ambiguity at category boundaries and requires interrupting training to re-cluster the entire corpus between iterations. We introduce S-JEPA, a JEPA-style encoder-predictor pair trained to match the soft posteriors of a Gaussian Mixture Model at masked positions via KL divergence. Training runs as one continuous optimization trajectory in two phases: a fixed GMM over MFCC features, then an online GMM over encoder features, with the input layer selected adaptively from a label-free signal, removing both the offline re-cluster step and the hand-tuned choice of which
transformer layer to cluster on. Under the SUPERB protocol, S-JEPA achieves the lowest WER among evaluated SSL methods below 90M parameters and matches HuBERT-Base on
emotion recognition at roughly half its parameter count, establishing a new Pareto frontier without offline re-clustering or teacher
distillation. An analysis of the predictor's per-frame
entropy on held-out
speech reveals a bimodal distribution with a substantial minority of frames near the
entropy of a perfect two-cluster tie, providing direct empirical evidence that the soft-target objective preserves the acoustic ambiguity that hard targets would collapse. Code is available at https://github.com/gioannides/s-jepa.
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All authors Georgios Ioannides, Adrian Kieback, Judah Goldfeder, Linsey Pang, Aman Chadha, Aaron Elkins, Yann LeCun, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv
Systems and Control
A Lyapunov-Based Perspective on Absolute Stability
Tessina H. Scholl
This article presents a unifying perspective on absolute stability concepts. In particular, it develops a Lyapunov-like explanatory framework for a nonscalar circle criterion with its small-gain and strict-passivity special cases. To this end, a general defining inequality for a Lyapunov-like function is proposed that avoids strict definiteness conditions, enabled by a strengthening of the sector constraint. We discuss different ways to derive a quadratic solution: via a linear
matrix inequality (LMI), an algebraic Riccati equation, and a
matrix equation. By exploiting the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov (KYP) lemma, classical frequency-domain results are recovered. A passivity-index-based result is derived that simplifies the evaluation. Overall, the presented interrelations may be useful for both analysis and teaching.
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Systems and Control
Dynamic Modeling and Load-Following Control of Small Modular Reactors with Moving-Boundary Steam Generators and Thermodynamically Coupled Rankine Cycles
Ali Mahboub Rad, Roshni Anna Jacob, Bikash Poudel et al. (+2 more)
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are increasingly considered for flexible power generation; however, many dynamic studies still neglect the thermodynamic coupling between the primary and secondary loops that is essential for accurate assessment of load-following capability. In this study, we develop a hybrid dynamic framework that couples an equation-based model of a NuScale-type integral pressurized water reactor, including the reactor, primary loop, and moving-boundary helical-coil once-through steam generator, with a physics-based secondary Rankine cycle comprising the steam throttle valve, turbine, condenser, and feedwater pump. This approach enforces mass and energy conservation across the coupled system while preserving physically consistent pressure-flow and enthalpy-flow interactions across the domain boundary. The integrated model reproduces nominal design-point conditions and is used to analyze a 5% step reduction in turbine mechanical-power demand under five control configurations, including a decentralized three-loop control architecture for the valve, feedwater pump, and control rods. The results show that partial control strategies can satisfy individual objectives but leave pressure, thermal, or phase-boundary deviations, whereas simultaneous action of all three actuators provides the most balanced response by stabilizing steam pressure, limiting primary-loop thermal deviations, and maintaining acceptable steam-generator operating margins during load-following maneuvers. Compared with a conventional linear steam-cycle representation, the coupled framework captures dynamic back-pressure and variable turbine enthalpy drop that are otherwise neglected, leading to different predictions of transient behavior and required steam flow.
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All authors Ali Mahboub Rad, Roshni Anna Jacob, Bikash Poudel, Mayir Mamtimin, Jie Zhang
Image and Video Processing
Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI
Mark A. Anastasio
Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated
algorithms and steady improvements on
benchmark tasks. However, this
algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
A Mixed-Reality Testbed for Autonomous Vehicles
H. M. Sabbir Ahmad, Ehsan Sabouni, Emrullah Celik et al. (+4 more)
We propose a mixed-reality, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed for autonomous vehicles that seamlessly integrates a physical testbed of mobile
robots with a high-fidelity simulation environment. The virtual simulation enables the creation of diverse, safety-critical driving scenarios to validate state-of-the-art perception, planning, and control
algorithms, while augmenting simulations with physical
robots equipped with
multimodal sensors in photorealistic virtual environments further facilitating rigorous validation. Our testbed also features vehicular connectivity using wireless communication and can accommodate a large number of
agents through the combination of physical
robots and virtual simulated
agents, supporting research on multi-
agent systems including Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Finally, we present a safety-guaranteed framework combining perception, planning and a novel online learning-based controller using Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) for CAVs. Experiments using the proposed framework are used to validate and demonstrate the key functionalities and the overall utility of the testbed to bridge the gap between simulation and real-world hardware deployment.
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All authors H. M. Sabbir Ahmad, Ehsan Sabouni, Emrullah Celik, Zean Wan, Damola Ajeyemi, Christos G. Cassandras, Wenchao Li
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Seeing Through Occlusion: Deterministic Arm Kinematic Correction for Robot Teleoperation
Thomas M. Kwok, Nicholas Koenig and Yue Hu
Markerless, single-RGB-D-camera motion capture provides a low-cost and non-invasive alternative to conventional marker-based systems for
robot teleoperation; however, depth estimation often degrades in the presence of self-occlusion, particularly during upper-limb motion. This paper presents an Arm Kinematic Correction (AKC) method that improves depth estimation by enforcing
geometric constraints based on constant arm lengths. The proposed approach reconstructs occluded joint depths by leveraging wrist positions and predefined arm lengths via a deterministic formulation based on the Pythagorean
theorem, thereby avoiding the need for complex probabilistic modeling or parameter tuning. Experimental validation against a Vicon reference system demonstrates reliable performance for both static and dynamic joint motions, evaluated using root-mean-square error (RMSE) and Pearson correlation. Furthermore, motion-mapping teleoperation is successfully demonstrated in both simulated and physical
robot environments. The results show that AKC enhances robustness and preserves anatomical consistency under long-duration, severe self-occlusion, even when paired with less reliable temporal filters, highlighting its practicality for real-time applications such as
robot teleoperation and human-
robot interaction.
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Signal Processing
Pushing the Limits: Unlocking the Potential of Faster-than-Nyquist Signaling
Zichao Zhang, Melda Yuksel, Shuangyang Li et al. (+2 more)
Faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) signaling is gaining
attention as a smart way to pack more data into limited spectrum by intentionally breaking the traditional symbol-spacing rules. This article takes a fresh look at FTN's potential to boost capacity, examining how performance varies across different acceleration factors and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) definitions. Beyond the theory, we explore what it takes to make FTN work in practice, such as dealing with power amplifier constraints, managing high peak-to-average power, and designing practical coding strategies. We also highlight real-world issues like spectrum sharing, short-packet communication, and receiver complexity. With applications ranging from low-latency links to integrated sensing and satellite systems, FTN offers a compelling path forward for future wireless technologies.
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All authors Zichao Zhang, Melda Yuksel, Shuangyang Li, Gokhan M. Guvensen, Halim Yanikomeroglu
Audio and Speech Processing
DASH: Dual-View Self-Distillation with Multi-Layer Hidden Representations for Robust Speech Recognition
Jaeeun Baik, Ui-Hyeop Shin, Jiwoon Lee et al. (+2 more)
Automatic
Speech Recognition (ASR) often degrades in real-world noisy environments, making noise robustness essential for deployment. Supervised noise-augmented fine-tuning is a common remedy, but it can introduce a robustness-clean trade-off and overfit to specific corruptions, degrading recognition in clean conditions. We propose DASH, a self-
distillation framework that improves robustness by learning clean–noisy consistency from paired views. DASH distills hidden representations from multiple encoder layers to capture features from low-level acoustics to high-level semantics, and stabilizes training by minimizing KL divergence between prototype assignment distributions of clean and noisy views. Experiments on LibriSpeech show that DASH consistently improves recognition under diverse noisy conditions while preserving clean accuracy, achieved by a label-free pre-training stage with minimal additional overhead (about 4% of fine-tuning time) beyond standard fine-tuning.
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All authors Jaeeun Baik, Ui-Hyeop Shin, Jiwoon Lee, Woocheol Jeong, Hyung-Min Park
Signal Processing · Cross-listed from quant-ph
Blind Symmetry Matching in Quantum States with Application to Shot-Count Reduction
Mitchell A. Thornton
Measuring a
quantum computation in a basis adapted to a
symmetry it carries reduces the repeated measurements, commonly referred to as “shots”, needed to read a statistical answer. Detecting the
symmetry a
quantum state carries has many uses: certifying a claimed
symmetry, identifying a conserved-charge sector, flagging
symmetry-breaking as an error signature, and selecting a compression or readout basis; shot-count reduction is developed here as one exemplary case. Existing methods assume the
symmetry is known in advance; we remove that assumption. When it is unknown, the carried
symmetry is discovered from the data by a
symmetry test that scores candidate groups, and the largest passing group is exploited as the measurement basis. We state the pipeline precisely, prove the selection rule is unbiased, and charge discovery in full. Two conditions are treated, both detected by the same score with a different projection: a weak condition, commutation with the representation, and a strong condition, confinement to a single charge sector, the distinction drawn in the
quantum-reference-frame literature. A single
circuit, a controlled twirl followed by a SWAP test, discovers both: discarding the group register tests the weak condition, post-selecting it the strong one. The framework is general over finite groups, with cyclic (
Fourier), dihedral, and symmetric-group (Schur-Weyl) examples; strong confinement to the symmetric, or Dicke, subspace is an exponential reduction. Seeded demonstrations show the loop wins net of discovery: weak matching on momentum readout reduces shots by a factor widening from ten to several thousand, and strong matching on a two-system target by a further factor of the subsystem size. Blind
symmetry matching is a practical primitive for the common case where the matched basis cannot be written down in advance.
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Image and Video Processing
Optimized Multi-Contrast Self-Supervised MRI Reconstruction using Learned k-space Partitioning
Brenden Kadota, Charles Millard and Mark Chiew
Objective: Deep Learning has shown promise in accelerating MRI by reconstructing high-quality images from under-sampled data. While recent work has leveraged multi-contrast information to improve reconstruction performance, these methods rely on supervised learning, which requires fully sampled k-space for training. One method, self-supervised learning via data undersampling (SSDU), enables direct training on under-sampled k-space by partitioning it into two sets, with a network mapping between the two. In this work, we improve MRI self-supervised MRI reconstruction with two modifications. Methods: We propose a multi-contrast self-supervised learning framework that jointly trains on multiple under-sampled contrasts without requiring fully sampled k-space data as a reference. Moreover, we learn an optimal self-supervised data partitioning for each contrast in an end-to-end manner, further enhancing reconstruction quality. Specifically, we learn an optimal partitioning probability distribution, which is sampled to generate a mask for partitioning. Results: Experiments on two publicly available multi-contrast MRI
datasets demonstrate the improved reconstruction quality of our proposed self-supervised multi-contrast learned partitioning method compared to the current single-contrast self-supervised learning methods. We also demonstrate that learning the partitioning of k-space data further enhances the fidelity of reconstructions. Conclusion: Multi-contrast reconstruction combined with learned partitioning improves reconstruction fidelity over single-contrast self-supervised MRI reconstructions. Significance: Our method can facilitate higher image fidelity and/or accelerated MRI protocol times compared to previous self-supervised methods, and without requiring fully sampled k-space for training.
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Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.RO
Hardware- and Vision-in-the-Loop Validation of Deep Monocular Pose Estimation for Autonomous Maritime UAV Flight
Maneesha Wickramasuriya, Beomyeol Yu, Jaden Shin et al. (+3 more)
Autonomous
UAV operations on ships require reliable
vision-based relative pose estimation, yet at-sea validation is costly, weather-dependent, and risky. This paper presents a hardware-validated
vision-in-the-loop framework that enables fully autonomous indoor flight while emulating photorealistic maritime environments. Rendered maritime views are processed onboard by a deep
transformer-based
monocular pose
estimator. Delayed
vision measurements are fused with high-rate IMU data using a delayed Kalman filter to provide consistent state estimates for
geometric control. The system captures critical embedded effects, including perception latency, asynchronous updates, and computational constraints, that are absent in pure simulation. Autonomous takeoff, trajectory tracking, and landing experiments demonstrate stable closed-loop flight. The results establish a safe and hardware-realistic intermediate stage for developing maritime
UAV autonomy prior to shipboard deployment.
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All authors Maneesha Wickramasuriya, Beomyeol Yu, Jaden Shin, Mason Huslig, Taeyoung Lee, Murray Snyder
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.GR
RespGeomLib: A Reproducible Parametric Engine for Generating Analysis-Ready Human Airway Lumen Geometry
Nichula Wasalathilaka, Parakrama Ekanayake and Roshan Godaliyadda
CT-derived airway models support pulmonary morphometry and airflow simulation, but are often limited by distal scan resolution and the need for substantial cleanup near bifurcations. Procedural alternatives are reproducible, yet many rely on stitched tubular primitives that introduce non-smooth junctions and poorly defined open boundaries. We present RespGeomLib, a reproducible parametric engine for generating analysis-ready human airway lumen surfaces from compact YAML specifications. The framework combines port-based assembly with implicit smooth-min junction blending to produce seamless junctions, while avoiding full-tree voxelization through analytic segments and local implicit extraction around bifurcations. Quantitatively, RespGeomLib yields cleaner junctions than a Boolean/stitch baseline and is substantially faster and more
memory-efficient than whole-tree global implicit extraction. We further demonstrate morphometry-guided tree generation, controlled synthetic airway variants, and CFD-ready export with stable airflow simulation. RespGeomLib targets biomedical workflows requiring reproducible morphometry, controlled synthetic variants, and simulation-ready lumen geometry. The code is publicly available at https://nichula01.github.io/Respgeomlib/
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Audio and Speech Processing
IndicContextEval: A Benchmark for Evaluating Context Utilisation in Audio Large Language Models Across 8 Indic Languages
Sakshi Joshi, Dhruv Subhash Rathi, Sanskar Singh et al. (+4 more)
AudioLLMs enable
speech recognition conditioned on textual
prompts such as domain descriptions or entity lists. However, it remains unclear whether these models genuinely utilise such context or rely on parametric knowledge learned during pretraining. Existing
benchmarks cannot answer this question because they evaluate transcription under fixed prompting conditions and rarely include explicit contextual inputs. We introduce IndicContextEval, a 56-hour
multilingual benchmark of natural
speech from 555 speakers across 8 Indian
languages and 23 professional domains. We design a 7-level prompting framework that progressively introduces contextual signals, including metadata, natural-
language descriptions, entity lists in English and native script, and
adversarial prompts with incorrect entities. Evaluating five models reveals substantial differences in context utilisation behaviour, highlighting the need for explicit evaluation of contextual grounding in AudioLLMs.
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All authors Sakshi Joshi, Dhruv Subhash Rathi, Sanskar Singh, Eldho Ittan George, R J Hari, Kaushal Bhogale, Mitesh M. Khapra
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG
OrthoReg: Orthogonal Regularization for Hybrid Symbolic-Neural Dynamical Systems
Till Richter and Niki Kilbertus
Dynamical systems are fundamental to modeling the natural world, yet modeling them involves a persistent trade-off: manually prescribed mechanistic models are interpretable by design but often overly simplistic and misspecified; in contrast, flexible data-driven neural methods lack physical insight. Hybrid modeling aims for the best of both worlds by combining a prescribed or symbolic, physics-based component with a flexible neural network. A critical challenge, however, is that the neural component may relearn mechanistic parts, yielding redundant and uninterpretable models, especially when the symbolic structure itself is discovered from data. Existing methods based on standard $L^2$ regularization rely on a projection argument that breaks when the symbolic component is learned through sparse discovery, allowing the neural augmentation to overlap with symbolic structure. We introduce OrthoReg (Orthogonal Regularization), which directly penalizes overlap between the symbolic and neural components, preventing symbolic structure from being absorbed by the neural residual. This yields a complementary decomposition: the symbolic part captures what the library can express, and the neural part captures what remains. On
benchmark dynamical systems with partial library mismatch, OrthoReg improves symbolic recovery and out-of-distribution behavior.
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Audio and Speech Processing
Continuous-Speech Parkinson's Disease Detection Using Acoustic and Inharmonicity Features
Rujia Li, Niloofar Momeni, Susanna Whitling et al. (+1 more)
Notable efforts have been made to identify Parkinson's disease (PD) from vocal data, primarily using sustained vowel phonations. In this work, we extend on these efforts introducing a PD identification approach for continuous
speech, enabling a practical background monitoring of voice data to detect vocal changes indicative of PD. Using two distinct data sets, we compare the best sustained vowel model with that of the proposed continuous
speech model, clearly illustrating the preferential performance of the latter. We examine approaches for speaker level evaluation and data leakage preventions, as well as how vowel information may be reliably extracted from continuous
speech. The proposed method framework exploits both traditional acoustic representations and a promising novel inharmonicity based framework, showing how the latter provides complementary information improving the performance for one of the data sets; however, for the other data set, this information did not significantly improve (nor reduce) the performance, suggesting that further studies are required before being able to draw firm conclusions in its use. Overall, the work clearly illustrates the benefit of forming PD classification using continuous
speech compared to using sustained vowel sounds.
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All authors Rujia Li, Niloofar Momeni, Susanna Whitling, Andreas Jakobsson
Signal Processing
Decentralized Power Control for Over-the-Air Computation with Phase Noise
Martin Dahl and Erik G. Larsson
Estimation of uplink channels is required for coherent over-the-air computation (OAC). When channel estimation is done using calibrated reciprocity, the estimates are only available locally to the devices. This poses a challenge for precoding and decoding, which cannot be coordinated centrally. To this end we use truncated channel inversion (TCI) and propose an approximate closed form solution and an exact numerical solver to optimize the TCI parameters. Importantly, we prove that the proposed TCI scheme is independent of the number of receiver
antennas in terms of mean-square-error (MSE). Furthermore, our analysis reveals a clear connection between the MSE and expected aggregate phase error across devices which gives insight to the scalability of OAC. Finally, simulations with comparisons to reference methods from prior work with globally available error-free channel estimates show that proposed is close, even outperforming these references in MSE under some conditions.
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Signal Processing
Explicit Interaction Architectures for Dynamical Learning: A Controlled Study of Structural Inductive Bias
Augusto Sarti
We investigate a structure-first approach to dynamical learning in which the organization of stateful interactions is prescribed explicitly rather than left entirely to a generic recurrent parameterization. We introduce causal recurrent units built from an ordered sequence of local, state-modulated transformations. The construction is motivated by wave-based interaction models, but the units studied here do not impose scattering, passivity, or energy-balance constraints. Because fixed recurrent dynamics, designed reservoir
topologies, readout-only learning, and recurrent depth are already well established, the empirical question is deliberately narrower: does the proposed interaction organization provide a useful inductive bias under controlled computational conditions? We compare a one-layer structured model, a two-layer structured model, and a generic echo-state network (ESN), all with 12 recurrent states and the same strictly linear ridge readout. Each model family receives the same random-search budget on calibration data that are disjoint from the final test data, after which the selected hyperparameters are frozen. On a custom nonlinear identification task, the one-layer structured model attains a mean validation NMSE of 2.76 x 10^{-4}, compared with 3.19 x 10^{-4} for the two-layer model and 3.94 x 10^{-4} for the ESN. On NARMA10 the ordering reverses: the ESN attains 0.312, compared with 0.348 and 0.357 for the one- and two-layer structured models. Thus, the proposed organization can be competitive and advantageous on one task, but it is not universally superior; moreover, recurrent depth does not provide a systematic benefit under matched state dimension. The results support a task-dependent interpretation of structural inductive bias and position the present architecture as a controlled precursor to stronger wave- and system-theoretic constructions.
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Systems and Control
Byzantine-Resilient Federated Multi-Agent Optimization Framework for Cyber-Secure Interconnected Microgrids
Ali Peivand and Seyyed Mostafa Nosratabadi
The escalating digitalization of distribution networks has exposed interconnected Microgrid (MG) clusters to Stealthy False Data Injection Attacks that bypass Bad Data Detectors and propagate through tie-line couplings and shared learning channels. This paper proposes BR-FedMAPPO, a Byzantine-Resilient
Federated Multi-
Agent Proximal Policy Optimization framework that learns a triple-surface Moving Target Defense and an adaptive isolation strategy for cyber-secure operation. Each MG hosts a local Actor-Critic
Agent whose policy is partitioned into a globally
federated shared encoder and a privately retained action head, so no MG exposes the configurations, cardinality, or locations of its D-FACTS lines, Battery Energy Storage (BES) units, or tie-line capacities. The action vector perturbs D-FACTS reactances, redirects BES injections, reshapes inter-MG exchanges, and includes a continuous islanding signal. A two-stage Byzantine-resilient aggregation rule combines trimmed-mean filtering with reward-weighted updates. This scheme incorporates a detection-quality score based on the F1-score and False Positive Rate to penalize clients causing false alarms. Simulation results on four interconnected MGs based on the IEEE 30- and 118-bus test systems demonstrate effective mitigation of coordinated S-FDI attacks, containment of cascading disruptions through adaptive isolation, and protection of distributed learning channels against malicious model manipulations while maintaining cost-aware dispatch performance.
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Systems and Control
Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Control for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems
Hugo O. Garcés, Alejandro J. Rojas, Bernardo A. Hernández et al. (+5 more)
This paper compares the performance of model-free controllers on a nonlinear system under cyberattacks, including false data injection and denial-of-service attacks. Four RL reward types are analyzed for accuracy, cost, and resilience. Results show that the Lyapunov reward offers the best resilience with low tracking error. Exponential mode also provides good trade-offs with acceptable resilience under moderate training conditions. Progressive and linear rewards converge faster but are less robust. RL-MPCs show strong steady-state resilience but require longer training times; RL-PID controllers are faster with significantly less training time. Proximal Policy Optimization outperforms Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient with a significant reduction in KPI variance. This study serves to highlight how well-designed RL rewards can improve performance and resilience against cyber threats.
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All authors Hugo O. Garcés, Alejandro J. Rojas, Bernardo A. Hernández, Andrés Escalona, Jonathan M. Palma, Md. Rezwan Parvez, Bhushan Gopaluni, Sirish L. Shah
Systems and Control · Cross-listed from cs.LG
FoMoE: Breaking the Full-Replica Barrier with a Federation of MoEs
Lorenzo Sani, Zeyu Cao, Meghdad Kurmanji et al. (+5 more)
Pre-training Large
Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures partially decouple model capacity from per-
token compute. This efficiency alone does not make MoE training feasible over ordinary Internet links or loosely connected commodity hardware since active expert routing still assumes high-speed datacenter fabrics. Low-communication methods such as DiLoCo and
Photon reduce synchronization frequency across distributed sites, mitigating bandwidth constraints, yet still require full model replicas at every site. This creates a mismatch: modern MoEs have sparse data paths, but their distributed training infrastructure remains communication-dense and
memory-inefficient, limiting attempts to pool geographically distributed compute. In this work, we introduce FoMoE, a system that breaks the full-replica paradigm by partitioning expert layers across workers and skipping non-resident experts during local training. We demonstrate that FoMoE: (I) reduces communication costs by up to 1.42x over efficient baselines and 45.44x over Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP) via partial expert replication in controlled regimes; (II) achieves empirical throughput speedups of up to 1.4x through the skip-
token mechanism; and (III) shows stable routing in the trained regimes and projects the communication/
memory benefits to 100B-scale configurations through system modeling.
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All authors Lorenzo Sani, Zeyu Cao, Meghdad Kurmanji, Alex Iacob, Andrej Jovanovic, Yan Gao, Wanru Zhao, Nicholas D. Lane